Older HN users may recall when busy discussions had comments split across several pages. This is because the Arc language that HN runs on was originally hosted on top of Racket [1] and the implementation was too slow to handle giant discussions at HN scale. In September 2024 Dang et al finished porting Arc to SBCL, and performance increased so much that even the largest discussions no longer need splitting. The server is unresponsive/restarting a lot less frequently since these changes, too, despite continued growth in traffic and comments:
While great option, LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp should not be overlooked, too many focus on SBCL + Emacs and then complain about Lisp tooling.
shadowgovt 51 minutes ago [-]
My favorite bit of SBCL trivia is the name: this is descended from Carnegie Mellon's build.
Steel. Bank.
wiz21c 43 minutes ago [-]
I don't get it :-(
wk_end 38 minutes ago [-]
I think it's just that Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, and the Mellons made their fortune in banking.
PantaloonFlames 9 minutes ago [-]
Yes and
Carnegie Technical Schools was founded in 1900 based on a $1m donation from Andrew Carnegie,
Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was originally founded in 1913 by Andrew and Richard Mellon.
Carnegie Mellon was created by combining the two institutions in 1967.
giraffe_lady 27 minutes ago [-]
That's very fun and makes so much more sense than my half guess that it was from a defunct regional mid 20th century bank I had never heard of.
emptybits 1 hours ago [-]
Can we get a "(1999)" date on this, please? Only half joking becuase I see Common Lisp and, sure, I upvote ... but honestly, what's the purpose of this HN submission without context?
SBCL is obviously fantastic but let's contrast with another popular implementation: Embeddable Common Lisp. https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/
Top marks for SBCL performance but ECL can be a better fit for embedding into mobile applications, running on lighter weight hardware, and in the browser.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41679215
[1] https://racket-lang.org/
Steel. Bank.
Carnegie Technical Schools was founded in 1900 based on a $1m donation from Andrew Carnegie,
Mellon Institute of Industrial Research was originally founded in 1913 by Andrew and Richard Mellon.
Carnegie Mellon was created by combining the two institutions in 1967.
SBCL is obviously fantastic but let's contrast with another popular implementation: Embeddable Common Lisp. https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/
Top marks for SBCL performance but ECL can be a better fit for embedding into mobile applications, running on lighter weight hardware, and in the browser.