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18:13:57
stylewarning
Xach: I'm having difficulty repro'ing this QL report: http://report.quicklisp.org/2021-03-31/failure-report/magicl.html#magicl_ext-blas
18:14:47
phoe
stylewarning: how are you trying to reproduce it? it seems that this is not a compilation error but a FASL-loading error
18:15:19
phoe
so I guess that the way to reproduce it would be to compile everything, then try loading magicl/ext-blas in a clean image
18:17:42
phoe
hmmm, magicl/ext-blas depends on magicl/core which defines the magicl.backends package
18:20:03
phoe
my train of thoughts is, this is because it is mentioned in DEFTYPE and this type might be expanded in DEFMACRO WITH-BACKENDS... hmmmm, I'm thinking out loud
18:21:13
phoe
that's because DEFTYPE is like DEFMACRO, functions called by/vars accessed in the type expansion must be available in the compilation environment, hence EVAL-ALWAYS
18:24:06
stylewarning
phoe: I'm just going to commit that because it makes sense. I admit I haven't been testing on other platforms that are a bit more picky about *-time evaluation
18:25:32
phoe
I have no idea what is it about Xach-platform that makes it picky in this particular case
18:34:46
stylewarning
phoe: well based on your hunch I did https://github.com/rigetti/magicl/pull/133
19:21:58
gnUser
Hi guys, I am new to lisp (want to learn it for Emacs) any tutorial you can recommend? And anything cool to research that has been made using lisp?
19:23:00
phoe
asking because Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, and #emacs is the best place to ask for that
19:23:31
minion
gnUser: please look at pcl: pcl-book: "Practical Common Lisp", an introduction to Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, available at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ and in dead-tree form from Apress (as of 11 April 2005).
19:28:55
phoe
they are somewhat similar on the surface but the deeper you go, the more different they are
19:30:11
phoe
tl;dr elisp is a single-implementation unstandarized language mostly used for programming emacs whereas CL is a multi-implementation ANSI-standarized general purpose programming language
19:30:55
phoe
(I don't think the guile backend for elisp is ready enough to count it as a second implementation...)
19:31:27
phoe
of course you can use elisp for general programming, though it's kind of not what it is very commonly used for and what it is most optimized for
19:32:08
phoe
although CL does not have a programming editor of emacs quality and availability of software (yet). a lot of people actually use emacs as the editor to program in CL
19:32:27
phoe
with toolkits like slime+swank, or sly+slynk, written in both elisp (client) and CL (server)
20:20:47
jmercouris
anyone know who is responsible for this: https://github.com/Lisp-Stat/lisp-stat ?
20:48:45
jmercouris
Half the time when I read a bio I’m not sure if the author is delusional about their achievements or really IS something special
20:49:16
jmercouris
This applies more specifically to autobiographies and other documents of that nature
21:08:50
palter
Just wish Steve didn't grab the Symbolics username on GitHub. Would've liked to use it for the actual Symbolics software. (Just the VLM for now until JCMa can be convinced otherwise.)
21:10:52
palter
Can't release it because of ownership issues. But, Dave Schmidt can grant access to the VLM on a per-request basis.
21:11:50
palter
If you were a Symbolics customer, he'd probably say it's ok for me to give you access.
21:31:51
caoliver
palter on-going? I while back I purchased an XL1201 which wound up with memory issues. I really didn't get much value from the expenditure. I still have the Gen 8.3 CD, but no hardware anymore. Is there any chance I would qualify for VLM? I put about $3K into the box and maybe got to run it 24 times or so before I had problems.
21:49:39
Feldman
I mean it also depends on the country you are in, travel to Switzerland and pirate to your heart's content.
21:49:53
caoliver
OG 2.0 exists in a very public place though. I certainly didn't put it here, and I'm quite surprised it hasn't gone away.
21:50:44
caoliver
I do feel the principle interest is historical though, a museum you can run on your computer.
21:51:36
caoliver
So, I think the world is a far better place if OC, Medley, and Squeak are out there to poison childrens' brains. ;-P
21:52:14
caoliver
ACTION has Squeak and Medley on his box, though most of his hacking is in LuaJIT and C.
22:01:13
xristos
i'd rather do squeak and morphic these days than waste my time with the ever-changing mess that pharo has become
22:02:29
caoliver
Agree. It strikes me as far harder to hack on, and more than a bit over-engineered.
22:11:19
caoliver
I'll ask. My interest as you might guess from the scrollback is in no way commercial.
22:11:46
palter
The version in the wild is definitely not legitimate and is based on an emulator that has some serious problems.
22:12:13
caoliver
If I were doing that sort of thing, it'd be on one of the Linux native platforms such as SBCL or CCL.
22:12:59
palter
Open Genera (OG) is now up to 3.0. Genera is up to 9.0. Portable Genera which is e version for Intel and ARM is at 2.0.
22:18:23
caoliver
I should imagine aside from some hush-hush things, there really aren't many if any commercial customers.
22:19:00
White_Flame
or I guess I should ask, os Open Genera removed from the ivory instruction set now?
22:36:05
White_Flame
palter: the reason I'm curious is that I have my own from-scratch ivory emulator in CL, which also compiles ivory bytecoded functions into native CL functions.
22:37:25
White_Flame
but, I certainly don't have enough of the system platform guts to get any of the worlds that are out there on the internet to boot past a few million instructions
22:46:03
palter
Open Genera, now Portable Genera, still runs through an Ivory emulator. What’s changed is that the emulator is now native on both Intel and ARM64.
22:47:09
palter
And, yes, it runs on Apple silicon (i.e., the new Macs). In fact, supporting those systems is why we had to rebuild Genera from source. The ARM version already ran fine on Linux. (I have it on a Pi4 at home.)
22:48:03
White_Flame
the biggest tradeoff I was looking at was C-based can do MMU stuff to not have to emulate the virtual memory aspects of each and every memory access, but CL would give me JITting of the ivory functions
22:48:27
palter
But, Apple silicon changed the hardware page size to 16KB and Genera used 8KB on the VLM which meant that as soon as two adjacent Genera pages needed different protection settings, Genera would crash. GC would trigger that all the time.
22:50:29
White_Flame
from CL, I get around a lot of that by simply allocating the entire 40GB address space in RAM
22:50:45
caoliver
I hacked up a pthreads system for LuaJIT, but Apple decided to go their own way WRT IPC.
22:50:54
palter
I started working on the VLM again back in 2014 (or ‘15) to help Dave Schmidt with one of his clients. He needed a working Intel version of the emulator.
22:51:54
palter
We’ve also done a good deal of patches to Genera itself to better support ANSI CL. (We have a client running hunchentoot on Genera as his development platform)
22:52:08
no-defun-allowed
Does Portable Genera do any code generation, or does it interpret the Ivory code?
22:52:25
caoliver
I will confess that having a lispm that fits in an Altoids tin is a novelty I can believe in. ;-)
22:52:55
palter
As I remember, since I’m not at my computers right now, booting Genera and immediately shutting it down takes about 3 billion instructions. (I have traces.)
22:53:45
White_Flame
traces of correct execution are _exactly_ what I need to get unblocked from my development, but those world images would be different
22:55:10
palter
The Pi4 is a bit sluggish compared to my other systems but is still much faster than original Ivory hardware.
23:07:22
palter
A Pi4 is equivalent to an XL18300. But an Apple silicon Mac is equivalent to an XL103000.
23:15:22
caoliver
ACTION has no top-o-the-line stuff. My stuff is mainly surplus third gen core-i Optiplexes running a very slimmed down Slackware.
23:54:47
xristos
palter: how likely is it that the VLM you're working on will be available to the public in the near future?
0:27:26
palter
We're still emulating a 32-bit processor. The default memory size in the emulator is 4095MW.
0:30:06
palter
This is a freshly booted VLM on my Apple silicon Mac mini https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/iegttaDL/VLM.png
0:32:00
caoliver
How do you have your keyboard mapped, or do you have an old 'bolix kbd interfaced to your mac?
0:32:01
palter
The emulator maps data to one area of memory and tags to another. So, if we were to somehow fill memory, it would be using 2^32 bytes for tags and 8^32. bytes for data.
0:33:41
palter
It is. The VLM world loads are actually store that way so we can mmap directly into memory.
0:34:40
no-defun-allowed
Is anything compiled to the register machine Genera runs on? Does that also split tags and data?
0:37:23
caoliver
I did have some time on a heavily locked down VAX/VMS box in school, but that was no fun.
0:39:22
caoliver
Relative of his (Sally) lives near me, and her late husband and I started a small ISP back in the 90s.
0:41:08
caoliver
The only historical thing I have on my boxen is a Hercules instance running Michigan Terminal System. I tossed that together to scare an old friend who went to UMich.
0:42:08
palter
(I've lived in Boston all my life. Started hacking in high school on an IBM 1130 in 1968)
0:52:34
terpri
White_Flame, revivory is a great name. i called my cl-based ivory emulator mammoth :) but it can barely POST at the moment, not close to full functionality
0:54:17
terpri
it's unfortunate that opengenera will presumably remain proprietary. some folks in #lispm were making good progress with CADR emulation (emulating newer versions than what was originally released), but the channel was locked without notice
1:02:24
terpri
https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3 <- CADR work (system 78 is usable and they're trying to get system 98 or 99 working; no idea how significant the differences between versions are though)
1:09:48
White_Flame
terpri: one thing that I really like and got in early is the ability to call directly from CL into Ivory functions, but that's only sane when the emulation is paused
1:10:06
White_Flame
it would be nice to transition both ways, and get native CL stuff accessed from Genera as well
1:11:52
White_Flame
my net connection is being stupid right now so I hven't kept up with the conversation, but I tried the instructions from https://static.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html again, and was able to build VLM from source, which is really, really good for me to be able to continue now. It hadn't worked in the past from source builds for me
1:23:56
palter
That is, of course, the C emulator which is a transliteration of the Alpha native VLM source code to C. It has some interesting issues. (One I remember from a client's site is that either the calendar clock or microsecond clock runs about 3 times real speed. Don't remember which one. But, TCP timeouts were messed up by it.)
1:26:14
palter
I would love to see Genera (and Open Genera and Portable Genera) released but JCMa hasn't answered my last email so I don't know why he won't.
1:27:02
White_Flame
right, I'm not porting that VLM, I'm rewriting from first principles. But it can give me an execution trace of what should be happening for reference, now that I can adjust its source and build
1:28:02
caoliver
JCMa is an interesting fellow to say the least. The license surrounding his web server was ummm... interesting.
1:32:25
terpri
fun factoid: according to my reading of the standard license header, as of 2018, the US federal government could unilaterally relicense most of the genera source code if they wanted, presumably due to the level of public funding
1:33:31
terpri
hard to say whether that's more or less likely than the copyright owner (john c. mallery?) relicensing it though
1:39:52
palter
This is the clause from the copyright notice that terpri was referencing. https://www.irccloud.com/pastebin/TXUEulOs/
1:41:06
terpri
caoliver, not sure if it's DARPA per se, but the clause refers to the National Reconnonaissance Office
1:41:11
caoliver
I just wondered about how the public funding came about. I was always a little miffed that RSA wasn't broadly available for public use given that taxpayers (via the Navy) funding the development.
1:41:46
terpri
and https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/48/252.227-7014#b_2 is the relevant law, i believe
1:42:31
caoliver
Not that I was any sort of genius (I'm most certainly not), but the Martin Gardner article piqued my interest.
1:43:24
terpri
"Government purpose rights shall remain in effect for a period of five years unless a different period has been negotiated." symbolics apparently negotiated something like a *thirty year* restriction :p
1:44:12
palter
This one is a bit more up-to-date I think. (Note the expiration date) https://www.irccloud.com/pastebin/6pYRUnLn/
1:47:43
caoliver
I think the key language is "No restrictions apply after the expiration date shown above."
1:48:37
caoliver
That would also depend on the government having worlds absent of classified information.
1:52:21
terpri
right, and "the Government shall have unlimited rights" after expiration. but whether they want to exercise those rights is a separate question
1:54:14
caoliver
Maybe I should have gone to law school rather than playing with math and computers.
1:55:19
terpri
hm, seems that you can only view relatively recent spending on usaspending.gov. but the army paid symbolics almost $600k between 2006 and 2011 (for onsite hardware and software support) so someone was still using it
2:03:23
palter
Those dates are post Symbolics so the Army would've been contracting through David Schmidt. I know that around 2015, there was a DoD dictum to get off non-standard systems. It's why Dave contracted with me (through Clozure) to do the Intel port.
2:04:41
palter
There were a couple of clients left then as I recall. One used Genera just for development and deployed on Allegro, I think. The other ran their application as a service.
2:05:32
palter
There's still a client who uses Genera for development and deploys on Allegro for a commercail product.
2:19:55
specbot
Examples of Effect of Readtable Case on the Lisp Printer: http://www.lispworks.com/reference/HyperSpec/Body/22_accba.htm
2:31:35
caoliver
That DoD dictum isn't surprising: What is surprising is that it wasn't issued sooner.
4:54:13
jcowan
Maiko, the Interlisp VM, also runs on both Mac and Linux (and Solaris and of course Linux for Windows)
4:54:46
jcowan
As for Elisps, it's true that Guile and Kawa don't provide the editor-specific data structures, but they do provide the Elisp language as such.