From: Olof-Joachim Frahm Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:36:17 +0000 (+0200) Subject: Add post about ELS 2015. X-Git-Url: http://repo.macrolet.net/gitweb/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=1cfd3f978f7cd42ea41a0c9224f413cc9acd4750;p=blog.git Add post about ELS 2015. --- diff --git a/els-2015.post b/els-2015.post new file mode 100644 index 0000000..90e350c --- /dev/null +++ b/els-2015.post @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +;;;;; +title: ELS 2015 +tags: lisp +date: 2015-04-22 21:35:23+01:00 +format: md +;;;;; + +Yesterday the 8th [European Lisp +Symposium](http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/) finished. In short it was +a great experience (I was there the first time, but hopefully not the last). +The variety and quality of talks was great, a good number of people attended +both the actual talks as well as both(!) dinners, so there were lots of +opportunities to exchange thoughts and quiz people, including on Lisp. Also +except for one talk I believe all talks happened, which is also a very good +ratio. + +For the talks I still have to go through the proceedings a bit for details, but +obviously the talk about the Lisp/C++ interoperability with Clasp was (at least +for me) long awaited and very well executed. Both the background information +on the origins, as well as the technical description on the use of LLVM and +the integration of multiple other projects (ECL, SICL, Cleavir) were very +interesting and informative. + +There were also quite a number of Racket talks, which was surprising to me, but +given the source of these projects it makes sense since the GUI is pretty good. +VIGRA, although it's a bit unfortunate name, looks pretty nice. The fact that +the bindings to a number of languages are available and in the case of the +Lisps make the interaction a lot easier is good to see, so it might be a good +alternative to OpenCV. It's also encouraging that students enjoy this approach +and are as it seems productive with the library. + +P2R, the Processing implementation in Racket is similarly interesting as there +is a huge community using Processing and making programming CAD applications +easier via a known environment is obviously nice and should give users more +opportunities in that area. + +If I remember correctly the final Racket talk was about constraining +application behaviour, which was I guess more of a sketch how application +modularity and user-understandable permissions could be both implemented and +enforced. I still wonder about the applicability in e.g. a Lisp or regular +*nix OS. + +The more deeply technical talks regarding the garbage collector (be it in SBCL, +or Allegro CL) were both very interesting in that normally I (and I imagine +lots of people) don't have (a chance) to get down to that level and therefore +learning about some details about those things is appreciated. + +Same goes for the first talk by Robert Strandh, *Processing List Elements in +Reverse Order*, which was really great to hear about in the sense that I +usually appreciate the `:from-end` parameter of all the sequence functions and +still didn't read the details of the interaction between actual order of +iteration vs. the final result of the function. Then again, the question +persists if any programs are actually processing _really_ long lists _in +reverse_ in production. Somehow the thought that even this case is optimised +would make me sleep easier, but then again, the tradeoff of maintainable code +vs. performance improvements remains (though I don't think that the presented +code was very unreadable). + +*Escaping the Heap* was nice and it'll be great to see an open-sourced library +for shared memory and off-heap data structures, be it just for special cases +anyway. + +Lots of content, so I doubt I'll get to the lightning talks. It'll be just +this for now then. Hopefully I have time/opportunity to go to the next ELS or +another Lisp conference; I can only recommend going.