Important news:

Subject: ECLM 2013 - two days left to register
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 19:17:26 +0200
From: Edi Weitz

Ladies and Gentlemen,

This is our last call - there are two days left to register for this year's ECLM in case you haven't done so already:

   http://weitz.de/eclm2013/

We have more than 50 registrations so far, but we wouldn't mind seeing another dozen or two...

Best regards,
Arthur & Edi.

I greatly enjoyed my last visit to ECLM and I can't recommend it highly enough if you want to meet people with interesting Common Lisp projects and ideas.

I'm very excited to be attending both ECLM and ELS in Madrid this year. This is the last week to register for ECLM, so if you want to go, you should register ASAP.

Today I was running some analysis on about 9,000 files, basically mapping a function over each to warm up a cache. Something like this:

* (map nil 'analyze-file *9000-files*)
time passes

I had no idea how well it was progressing, and whether I'd need to take a snack break or let it run overnight. So I interrupted it and wrote a quick and dirty REPL utility function:

(defun :dot-every (count fun)
  (let ((i 0))
    (lambda (&rest args)
      (when (< count (incf i))
        (setf i 0)
        (write-char #\. *trace-output*)
        (force-output *trace-output*))
      (apply fun args))))

It prints out one dot per COUNT invocations of the function it returns, giving some indication of progress. Sensible values for COUNT depend on the volume of function calls.

For this problem, I called it with a COUNT of 100:

* (map nil (:dot-every 100 'analyze-file) *9000-files*)
............etc

The cached analyses printed out a ton of dots quickly, and the uncached analyses started printing dots at a slow but steady pace, and I could tell that it would be done in a few minutes instead of a few hours.

So now I'm going to use this to wrap up any function I have to call a ton of times and I want to get a sense of how it's progressing.

• The crucial role of the readtable
• Emacs is NOT required to hack Lisp
• The historical context of Baker's META
• Designing an OS for the PDP-8 (and part 2)

Well, it has been more than 20 years with Lisp in earnest... I'm sitting on a gold mine of great code that I have
used over the entire period, and still use daily in my work. But it seems the Lisp community is a bit short on
libraries of code. No point sitting on all this stuff till I die...

One of the (many) great things I have found with Lisp is that Code Rot (I always called this Bit-Rot, but I
realize that I'm wrongly attributing when I do that) is almost a non-problem, compared to just about every
other language system that I have used in my 40+ year career. I'm still using a large body of code that I wrote
nearly 15-20 years ago and has never needed any maintenance.

My code generally grows organically to supply solutions to problems I am facing in my own work. I generally
don't write libraries for others to use. And that will show through in a lot of what I share with the world.
C'est la vie...

The upshot in terms of Lisp evangelism has been quite good, BTW. Most
of the students have only been exposed to Java and scripting languages
so far and there are always some who express an immediate interest in
learning more about CL.

Amazon Glacier came out a few months ago. Glacier is a system for storing data very cheaply, only $0.01 per gigabyte per month. It also has a high level of redundancy and reliability. The drawback, compared to S3, is that you can't access it on demand. It was added as a new API, and I looked into writing a CL library for it, but never found the time.

A few days ago Amazon announced integration between S3 and Glacier. Objects in S3 can be automatically transitioned to Glacier storage after a period of time. It's very similar to the automatic object expiration support already present in the S3 API.

Since I already have an S3 library, I updated it to support the new Glacier features.

The lifecycle-rule function has been revamped to support a new action argument, :transition. Instead of deleting the object when the rule is applied, it is transitioned to Glacier storage.

New functions restore-object and object-restoration-status let you initiate a Glacier object restoration and query the status of that restoration.

Here's an example:

  (zs3:create-bucket "storage.xach.com")
  (setf (zs3:bucket-lifecycle "storage.xach.com") 
        (zs3:lifecycle-rule :action :transition 
                            :prefix "glacier/" 
                            :days 7))

  (zs3:get-file "storage.xach.com" "glacier/archive.tgz" "/tmp/archive.tgz")
  Error: "InvalidObjectState: The operation is not valid for the object's storage class"

  (zs3:restore-object "storage.xach.com" "glacier/archive.tgz" :days 1)

  (zs3:object-restoration-status "storage.xach.com" "glacier/archive.tgz")
  => "ongoing-request=\"true\""

From: Ruben Garcia Martin
Subject: Vagrantfile for Common Lisp
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

Hi All,

For those of you who use Vagrant boxes for development, I have published a configuration to set up a minimal Common Lisp environment quickly here:

https://github.com/finitud/vagrant-common-lisp

Please feel free to use & comment.

Regards,

Ruben.

Tapiwa Gutu writes about developing a Grand Unified Unit Test Framework for Common Lisp: Part 1 and Part 2.

From: Anton Vodonosov
Subject: library reports
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 01:17:51 +0400

Hello.

Another usage of the results collected by cl-test-grid is
separate reports for every library in Quicklisp.

The results include build status for the library ASDF systems
and test-suite results (if the test suite has test-grid adapter)
on every lisp implementation we have tested.

The reports may be found at
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/library/<library name>.html

Index of all the reports: http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/library/

PS

Xach, could you announce this on planet lisp?

Just published reports with October data (so far we collected
results of 7 CL compilers, in various compiler version/OS combinations
it is around 27 compiler kinds).

The most interesting report for you must be this one:
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/quicklisp-diff.html
It displays the all the tests which have different outcome
on September and October Quicklisps.

- Anton

From: Anton Vodonosov <avodonosov@yandex.ru>
Subject: Re: combining load failures with dependencies information to
 priorities fixes

Xach, could you please arrange the following
clarification to be forwarded to Planet Lisp? It's necessary
in particular to restore/confirm good names of ECL and Closer to MOP?

When I posted the first message in this thread and
CC'ed Xach, I wanted to present the results
cl-test-grid may provide, but I forgot that the results
deal with failures, and without proper explanation
it may cast shadow of bad impression onto someone's
hard work.

In this case ECL and Closer to MOP were mentioned
in context of large table of failures.

First of all. The absolute minority of the compile-load
failures presented in the report are bugs in ECL (if any).

The failures may be classified by their cause into:
- CL implementation bugs
- library bugs
- library intentionally supports only limited
  set of CL implementations
- absence of certain foreign library
  on the test system.

By priority for the lisp implementation maintainer:

1. CL implementation bugs are of course of interest
   for the maintainer.

   Here I want to say how they are handled in ECL.
   Of course, ECL can not be bug free, especially
   taken into account that in the recent years it saw
   major changes (fully rewritten Lisp-to-C compiler,
   newly introduced bytecode compiler, refactoring
   of multi-threading infrastructure, performance
   improvements and lot of other improvements).

   But when critical bugs are found, they are usually
   fixed very quickly. This demonstrates the great level
   of control Juan Jose has on the ECL code base.

2. Bugs in basic widely used libraries as alexandria;
   portability layers like closer-mop, usocket,
   bordeaux-threads; important libraries as
   hunchentoot or drakma.

   This is not the area of direct "responsibility"
   for the CL implementation developer who didn't started
   the project and didn't make a commitment to
   support it.

   I put "responsibility" into quotes because very
   often we deal with open source projects, which
   are provided AS IS. No-one is obliged to provide
   support. The applies also to the library author.

   Of course, CL implementation developer might
   be interested to support such important libraries
   to achieve wider adoption of his CL implementation.
   The library author is also usually interested.
   And the users of the library, who want to develop
   applications on the given CL implementation are
   also interested to see the library fixed on this CL
   implementation.

   So, this is an area where interest of various parties
   overlaps and we may hope the issue will be fixed
   (depending the time available for these parties
   and presence of necessary knowledge).

   Speaking particularly about Closer to MOP on ECL.
   ECL has improved MOP support recently, but the API
   changes are not backward compatible. According
   to the Pascal's comment in his blog, now Closer to MOP
   will need a lot less code to support ECL. But migration to the
   new API will take some development time.

3. Compile/load failures which do not need to be fixed.

   For a library developer it is often the only possible
   or at least the most reasonable solution to support
   limited set of CL implementations, because supporting
   and testing on every CL requires more time than available.
   
   If there is a library named "my-html-utils" which is
   only used by "my-web-application" and the library
   author works with one particular CL implementation,
   there is no need to bother neither the library author,
   nor other community members with requests to port
   the library onto other CL implementations.

   What we can do is to collect and provide information
   about what works where, and the author will decide
   himself. Or maybe the first user, who whats to
   employ the library on a different implementation
   will port it.   

   I assume that the failures in the category 3 might
   constitute the majority of all the failures.

4. Absence of foreign library on the test system.
   I plan to adjust cl-test-grid agent in the future
   so that CFFI errors will be recognized and
   stored as a special status, so that we will be
   able to exclude them from report + maybe collect
   the list of foreign libraries used by whole Quicklisp.
   But it's not the highest priority, the reports
   in the current form allow to make lot of useful
   conclusions.

That's it. I hope it clarifies any doubts about the
quality of work done by ECL and Closer to MOP developers.

And also on my intentions. I don't call the developers
to spend even more of their time. Other way around.
We should anticipate the fact that developers time is
very limited. If we all be realistic and stay within
limits of possible the results will be more satisfying.
I hope that presence of information will allow to
save developers energy by helping them to choose
areas where the efforts will give maximum outcome;
to decide also what may be avoided.

The load failures + dependencies report was build for
ECL first because it was Juan Jose's proposal to
combine them together to prioritize problems.

I've just published similar reports for some
other CL implementations I have:

http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/abcl-load-failures.html
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/acl-load-failures.html
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/ccl-load-failures.html
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/cmucl-load-failures.html
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/sbcl-load-failures.html
http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-test-grid/ecl-load-failures.html


Best regards,
- Anton