I always felt Slava Pestov's (now abandoned) blog on Factor's development was a good view into language design: http://factor-language.blogspot.com/
He and Andy Wingo (http://wingolog.org) both write very well on language issues though they may skew towards implementation concerns over design concerns.
Hi, Patrick! Sprocketnes has been helpful reading as I've worked on my own emulator. Ian Piumarta's lib6502 uses plain C macros. It's even almost as short as cl-6502...though I don't think it's quite as readable. ;)
Keep up the great work on Rust, been waiting on the gc/scheduler stuff to shake out a little bit. Looking forward to 0.8!
Me too! Common Lisp actually was intended for system programming historically, back from when Lisp Machines had a shot at ruling the world. Consequently, there is quite nice support for low-level programming.
As a long time fellow traveler in the land of Literate Programming, I must ask how you created the document---by hand or with tools and if tools, which ones?
Basically, you write markdown comments in the code and there is a Makefile that uses awk and sed to grab them out, cat some things together and pass it to an awesome LaTeX stylesheet written by Pete Kazmier. See: https://github.com/redline6561/cl-6502/tree/master/src/doc and the Makefile in the parent directory.
The original GitHub repo is private right now, because I'm not yet ready to reveal the site I'm building :). I plan to launch in two-three weeks; I'm working on content and styling right now.
Ha. The optional dynamic backend got taken out during a rewrite in August but it was never very interesting. The new plugin and theme support is much more interesting. ;)
That suggests to me that concerns over thread safety that are taken into account in the Java implementation, say of the core data structures, STM, etc, are not taken into account in the std. lib. of ClojureScript. That would make it unlikely for this code to be a useful origin or starting point for, say, an LLVM backend.
Rich is a very clever fellow and makes fascinating trade offs between pragmatism and idealism in his language design. He continues to build languages quite tied to some existing runtimes which embrace their advantages and drawbacks. Consequentially, it will be very important to keep the rationale in mind while evaluating the real impact of ClojureScript. https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/wiki/Rationale As neat as it would be to see, it will be a long time before an x86 or ARM backend emerges.
As far as I know, the G1 Garbage Collector in the JVM is still the top of the crop of production GCs and even Haskell with GHC7 is still working towards something of similar potency. See http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/new-gc-preview
Concurrent GCs and other aspects of runtimes geared towards heavy concurrency are insanely hard. Just something to keep in mind.
I'm sorry I didn't get my point across very clearly. Perhaps my writing style is to blame. I often start writing when I "feel it" and figure out what I'm really trying to say as I go then go back and rework as necessary. Too top heavy, I suppose.
Anyway, my point was to celebrate the "heads down, working" nature of a lot of common lispers and to try doing some minor image adjustment. (Common) Lispers don't do terribly much promotion of the language and community or some of its shared values. That often complicates things because folks show up with the wrong idea.
I was hoping this would celebrate where "we" are and maybe clear some things up a little for outsiders. Seems I missed that latter goal. :-/
Keep in mind that those were just my impressions, and I could be completely wrong as to how others feel. I think your points are correct for the most part. I also appreciate that you are trying to promote the language, which can't happen enough.
He and Andy Wingo (http://wingolog.org) both write very well on language issues though they may skew towards implementation concerns over design concerns.