Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?

One annoying part of SBCL is that it does something up front with its memory such that if you run it with an 8GB heap, running shell commands takes a noticeably long time even for "echo hi". It’s something to do with the way it forks. Shell commands are also serialized, meaning multiple threads running curl won’t help you more than a single thread running curl. This is in contrast to almost every other programming language, which lets you get more performant network fetches by running the requests in multiple threads. The only alternative to curl is to use a library that simulates curl or write your own, which is fraught with errors: if any piece of the connection times out, it has to gracefully terminate, which is harder than it sounds when you’re interfacing with OpenSSL directly.

I think that covers my list of grievances though, and it’s a pretty short list. Other than those, CL has been good to me.

I have been using cl for a project recently, as it had many features I wanted and actually made sense to use despite not being familiar with it (though used elisp and a tiny bit of scheme). I found it mixed some things where fantastic some things remain pain points, SBCL is a fantastic project and compiler and once you get used to the debugging it's a very nice experience with slime. It is true to say that it's flexibility is fantastic and CLOS object system once you get used to it is very nice. On AI assisted coding I found it mixed and though Claude now seems quite good at it, local models can be quite poor and lots of things are a lot less well documented and the fact that there is less code out there. One thing to look out for with local models (and probably even the frontier models but with there larger size negates the issue entirely from my usage) is that '(' or ')' might be part of a token such that '))' is a discrete token and '(*' might be as well, all that is to say that when it writes code terminating and start blocks can be an issue so your parens will be off, this was when using omnicoder 9B and that was the main issue. not sure how more recent local models function as switched to claude for part of it and tended to prefer to take my time and write the code myself.

I spent the last year writing substantial Common Lisp, including a FoundationDB client and distributed systems primitives layered on top of that, an observability and operability library for CL systems, and a large scale log, metrics and tracing platform that leverages these - in about 200K lines of code and tests. My take on this, apart from one of familiarity and personal preference/taste in choosing a programming language, in the age of LLMs are - 1. From a “functional requirements” perspective, any language will do. You can build substantial systems in something low level like C or higher level like Python or Common Lisp for example. 2. From a security perspective, if you are using LLM assisted code generation, whether you use C or Rust or Common Lisp does not really matter I think - current models are capable, and future models perhaps more so, in producing secure code.

My understanding is that LLM are deflationary, resulting in code being priced as a commodity (cost plus). If this bears out, then lower token costs and higher performance (esp in my case, where good performance results in lower infra costs to host the service) will start to matter more and more. Common Lisp code bases are famously dense (in the good sense), resulting in perhaps lower token costs when an LLM needs to review and make a change (smaller code bases also help humans / small teams). Common Lisp can achieve performance that’s close to that of an equivalent implementation in C or C++.

Taken together, they make for one case for using CL and other similar languages, although one that’s grounded largely in economics.

I’m fascinated that some people in our field choose to self describe themselves as “elite”.

Are there any programming/computer science greats that self aggrandize like this? Is it a cultural thing somewhere that I’m not aware of?

I don't know if anything has changed, but last time I tried codegen for Common Lisp, the LLM would routinely mix up LISP dialects and language specific features.

Less so with Clojure.

>I do not operate the LLM in a sterile text editor. I operate it from within a Lisp REPL

I'd be very interested in reading more about this.

In short: sunk cost fallacy.