
Lispworks 7.0 with Mobile (iOS, Android) Runtime - deepaksurti
http://www.lispworks.com/products/lw4mr.html
======
WalterGR
BTW, this is a full new release of LispWorks.

What's New blurb:

"New features in LispWorks 7.0 include a Java interface and improved Unicode
support. There are new ports to ARM Linux and PowerPC/AIX, a 64-bit
Professional Edition, and new Editions for hobby users at lower prices.
Additionally, our new products LispWorks for Android Runtime and LispWorks for
iOS Runtime target 'headless' Lisp libraries which you can incorporate into
mobile apps."

Brief release notes:
[http://www.lispworks.com/news/news34.html](http://www.lispworks.com/news/news34.html)

More complete release notes:
[http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme...](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme-131.htm)

Price Information for customers in North America and the rest of the world
except Europe, India, China (PRC) and Taiwan:

The IDE:
[http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1c.html](http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1c.html)

The "Hobbyist" editions of the IDE:
[http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1h.html](http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1h.html)

The mobile run times, which require the IDE:
[http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-
lw4mr-1c.html](http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-lw4mr-1c.html)

(The pricing pages suggest that the mobile runtime licenses are annual whereas
the license for the IDE is for a single version and doesn't expire.)

And last but not least, the IDE edition comparison table:
[http://www.lispworks.com/products/features.html](http://www.lispworks.com/products/features.html)

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616c
I wonder if the mocl people will chime in, as they are the other game in town.

[https://wukix.com/mocl](https://wukix.com/mocl)

Wish I knew enough Lisp to warrant buying any of these! But there is no way I
would be dedicated to build an app in it.

~~~
lambdaelite
While there is some overlap with the new mobile portion of LispWorks 7, mocl
isn't in the same league. Allegro CL would be the proper competitor to
LispWorks.

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duncan_bayne
I've asked their support folks whether they've plans to support mobile GUI
too. I'm busy using Common Lisp to build a (hobbyist) home automation system
and would love to develop mobile UIs in the same language ...

~~~
deepaksurti
I have tested with the iOS Beta version while writing a 3D sports simulation
game. I have missed these: a full object DB with a query language. Right now I
use rucksack which serves my needs. Very productive to not have to deal with
Core Data!!!

The other thing I miss is live edits, though using TCP sockets while having
the device on the same network will work. But I don't know how to overcome iOS
security restrictions which prevent compilation of new code.

Being able to write AI for a game and all game logic in CL is complete fun, as
usual.

------
arethuza
Good to see LispWorks still going - I used it from '89 to '95 running on Sun
and DEC Alpha workstations. Oddly enough one of the projects I worked on had a
user interface written in PostScript (NeWS) driven by a Lisp backend -
Harlequin, the original publishers of LispWorks ended up going into the
PostScript RIP business.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I second that. Many years ago I worked on their documentation in return for a
little money and a discount on licenses. For customer projects it is good to
have a vendor like LispWorks or Franz backing you up.

For cost reasons, I use SBCL or Clojure for my own projects.

------
Tomte
Finally a hobbyist edition, but still too pricey for me.

~~~
darklajid
Agreed - and the pricing information is a) cumbersome to get to b) weird..

The prices below apply in the indicated regions only and are shown in US
_Dollars_. [1]

LispWorks 7.0 for Android Runtime, annual license with free upgrades and
technical support

€800

1: [http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-
lw4mr-2c.html](http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-lw4mr-2c.html)

------
coldcode
Currently it is 32-bit only so you can't really use it for anything in the
store. They are working on 64bit.

------
gaze
Holy hell why is this still so expensive? 64-bit Lispworks is $3000 when
visual studio professional is $1200? Visual studio community is FREE for
COMMERCIAL USE in small teams! What student has 500 bucks to throw at
something that can't even distribute binaries?

~~~
lispm
One is a multi billion dollar company with products milking its customers.

The other one is LispWorks, a small company in the UK serving a small market.

Food for thought:

[http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/whatisit](http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/whatisit)

A JVM, yearly (!) cost for a single server: $8000.

~~~
gaze
Yeah but if you're a company the price of something is completely different.
Maybe that server needs really excellent realtime performance for some really
specific business need (finance?) I just don't understand how 500 bucks is a
hobbyist price for a piece of software.

~~~
lispm
It seems that for this particular piece of software, there is no cheaper way
to produce it. It's a compromise of pricing a product to keep it attractive
and being able to do sustained business from the UK, where a team of
developers is more expensive that in some other parts of the world.

$500 is affordable for a lot of people. An iPhone 6 costs more. A vintage
Symbolics Lisp Machine just was sold for $5150, more than ten times compared
to a hobbyist LispWorks license.

------
Mikeb85
Price is too steep. I'd rather just use Clojure or SBCL...

~~~
spacemanmatt
As a Clojurist, I approve of this message.

~~~
duncan_bayne
Sooooo ... tell me about conditions & restarts in Clojure these days ;-P

On a serious note, a good friend of mine recently evaluated Clojure and fell
in love with it. Interestingly, he loves it for the same reason I didn't: the
JVM.

He saw his life being made easier by great Java integration, I saw the
language and tooling being hindered by having to target the JVM. I think we're
both right :)

~~~
jwr
As a serious (though former) Common Lisper, I recommend you take a look at
Clojure. Rich Hickey's presentations are a great starting point.

I did, and I haven't looked back — things that I thought would be complete
road-blockers turned out not to be a problem at all (no CLOS, no
conditions&restarts, Lisp-1, empty list not the same as nil, JVM). And there
were things that made life soooo much better (concurrency primitives, STM data
structures, ClojureScript, and, yes, JVM (it's better than you think)).

Even if you don't start using it, it's worth taking a look.

------
frr149
That's cool, but I think they should really be working on a clojure IDE. It's
the only Lisp that seems to be going anywhere.

~~~
pavelludiq
Yes, abandon something that's been making money for 30 years and throw away
decades of domain expertise because it's not fashionable. Great idea.

Not that clojure is a bad language(I actually like it quite a bit), but
compared to the professional common lisp world, it's a baby. CL has an
extremely high-quality and stable specification, dozens of very good
implementations for pretty much every platform(whit several ones that are
decades old, and several ones that are brand new), a community that simply
refuses to die, and use cases where clojure would be completely inadequate.
Not to mention the assertion that non-clojure lisps are not going anywhere is
completely false, both common lisp and racket(hell, even elisp) are growing in
their niches and developing their ecosystems. Books and libraries are being
written, products are being developed, conferences and meetups are organized,
businesses are started and research is being done.

~~~
themartorana
With zero snark, because I've never had the (apparent) pleasure of working
with a lisp, what are the use cases for Common Lisp? It barely registers when
talking about building APIs and production cloud platforms for game services,
which is my current wheelhouse. Clojure comes up, of course...

~~~
copsarebastards
A few cases I've seen CL used for:

1\. Decision systems for stock and commodities trading.

2\. Flight scheduling and flight price optimization.

3\. Social network analysis and advertising impact analysis.

What all of these problems have in common is that they involve crunching a
fuckton (the technical term) of data, sometimes in real time, and making
decisions based on it. Some of the problems are NP complete and use genetic
algorithms and other techniques to approximate ideal solutions. These are
extremely hard problems.

It's also worth noting that many of these systems were started in the 80s and
90s and encode a lot of research and business logic which simply isn't yet
available elsewhere.

I'd love to work on one of these systems, but unfortunately I've only been
working in industry a mere decade and the competition in that area has mostly
2-3 times that level of experience.

