

Acheron: A Common Lisp to JavaScript compiler written in 100% Java - sedachv
http://sourceforge.net/projects/acheron/

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lispm
Who would write a Lisp compiler in 100% Java. Why??? There are a few things
that are easier to write in Lisp, high on that list is a Lisp compiler.

~~~
alnayyir
Deployment, accessibility.

Consider adjusting your tone and the quality of your response, it just makes
you sound partisan rather than informed.

~~~
lispm
Deployment of what? How would a compiler written in ABCL and delivered as Jar
be more difficult to deploy???

Accessibility? For who? The people who actually can maintain a Common Lisp
compiler are using mostly Lisp and share parts of their code. There is almost
no Common Lisp compiler written not in Lisp. Part of the runtime system may be
written in C, but much of the rest is Lisp and especially the compiler.

For example the compiler for ABCL running on top of the JVM is written in
Lisp:

[http://trac.common-
lisp.net/armedbear/browser/trunk/abcl/src...](http://trac.common-
lisp.net/armedbear/browser/trunk/abcl/src/org/armedbear/lisp/compiler-
pass1.lisp)

Please stop your patronizing tone. You can also increase the quality of your
own response, which was near zero.

~~~
alnayyir
Lispers have a decidedly notorious reputation for wailing about the lack of
respect their family of languages tends to get.

I say this as someone who is incredibly fond of hacking in Clojure and has
spent a fair amount of time with a couple Scheme implementations.

Railing against someone else's work without providing cogent reasons for why
their approach is inferior to what you have in mind doesn't do much for the
community.

Not this community nor the Lisp community.

It's a lot easier to make a case from a business point of view for a lisp that
can be deployed anywhere JVM is, rather than potentially have to get into the
rigamarole of standardizing another piece of technology.

Programming languages that never help programmers get their jobs done don't
help the world much beyond being proof-of-concepts.

That's my point and it's the point you need to refute before you start
flailing around like a wanton child in retaliation.

When your language/toy of choice is unproven and not otherwise well accepted
in the business/technology world the onus is upon you to prove your points.

No one owes you or your preferred tools any free credibility.

~~~
lispm
So much drivel, so little content. Stop writing bullshit.

ABCL is written in Lisp AND RUNS ON THE JVM. What's so difficult to
understand? You can deploy it everywhere where the JVM runs. Totally painless.

All of Common Lisp has already been written in Lisp and is available both in
GPL and Public Domain versions. A Lisp compiler could just reuse all of that
or parts of it and just needs to compile to JVM byte codes. There is no need
to rewrite all of that in Java - it exists already. There is no need to
rewrite the library functions in Java. There is no need to rewrite the REPL in
Java.

All you need is the code generator and some runtime parts. The rest, and
that's a lot, exists already and can be taken.

The only thing you get by writing 100% Java is some Lisp dialect that will
have tons of bugs and problems.

A compiler written in 100% Java is DOA.

------
sedachv
There's also a blog: <http://lispnyc.org/blog/acheron>

