Common Lisp, ASDF, and Quicklisp: packaging explained

Posted by todsacerdoti 15 hours ago

Common Lisp, ASDF, and Quicklisp: packaging explained(cdegroot.com)

44 points | 9 comments

susam 6 minutes ago|

Quicklisp is great and I recommend using it along with a brief introduction in both my Common Lisp setup guides for Vim and Emacs:

https://susam.net/lisp-in-vim.html

https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl

However, for my personal projects, I usually just follow the ancient practice of downloading the packages I need with curl within a simple while loop:

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/Makefile#L83-L...

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/meta/cldeps/fo...

Then I point ASDF to the download directory with CL_SOURCE_REGISTRY and load it in my Lisp program using good old ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM:

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/etc/form.servi...

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/form.lisp#L5

The last four links I have shared above all get automated by a simple QL:QUICKLOAD call if we're using Quicklisp, and that's one of the reasons Quicklisp has become almost a de facto standard in the community.'

librecell 1 minute ago||

thank you so kindly for sharing this it is very helpful!

regularfry 2 hours ago||

What's missing from any of this, which has really confused me in the past, is any notion of dependency versioning. We get predefined dependencies as a distribution in quicklisp - which is great as far as it goes - but how do people manage without being able to say "this system depends on a version of that system greater than X"?

aidenn0 1 hour ago|

TL;DR: If I find a library I'm using would need dependency versioning, I consider that library broken and find (or write) an alternative.

You can always just add a version check and error out if it's too outdated. The thing there isn't an easy way to do is say "this needs a version of that system lower than X" but it would be unusual for a system to intentionally break backwards compatibility (or for an unintentional break to not be fixed relatively quickly after being discovered); usually if there is the semver equivalent of a "major version" change in lisp, the system-name itself gets changed.

tmtvl 1 hour ago||

Quicklisp is great, it's the defacto standard, but compared to OCICL it kinda feels ancient. There's also CLPM, but last time I checked it was broken by a combination of dead links and missing functions.

marcrosoft 1 hour ago|

Last time I checked quicklisp also didn’t support https and doesn’t do any signature checking.

mtdewcmu 3 hours ago||

I started learning Common Lisp, but ASDF and Quicklisp threw me off. I couldn't tell if you were supposed to choose one or the other or they were used together. This might revive my interest in Common Lisp if I get around to reading it. But in the meantime I drifted off to Racket, which is relatively well documented and has extensive libraries and really unique features.

bilegeek 2 hours ago|

For anybody who's still confused, the tl;dr is ASDF is the actual package loading mechanism, Quicklisp doubles as an ASDF wrapper and a package manager.

brooke2k 2 hours ago|

I messed around with common lisp for a while a few months ago, and I remember the packaging/dependency situation was by far the most difficult and confusing part. So thanks for writing this article, bookmarked it for the next time I write some CL :)