CLISP Help Wanted
CLISP project founder
Bruno Haible was one of the
finalists for the 2002
Free Software Award! Note that it said:
"Bruno Haible (known for his work
on GNU CLISP)"!
Now it is your chance to win the next Free Software Award!
The CLISP project is looking for excellent C and Lisp hackers who can
enhance CLISP and add new features
(see development
sources).
The prizes for handling the issues listed below:
- handle one issue and you get Mercurial write access;
- handle two issues and you become an admin of the CLISP project;
- handle three or more issues and you become the principal maintainer.
This reminds me of a joke: after the 1991 Russian coup attempt (whose
failure lead to the final downfall of communism), the
Communist Party
was very unpopular and tried to increase the membership by asking the
existing members to recruit new members, with the following incentives:
- if you bring one new member, you don't have to pay membership dues
- if you bring two new members, you may resign from the Party
- if you bring three new members, you may resign and you will also receive
a certificate that you have never been a member of the Party!
The CLISP tasks
Entry-level tasks
- Add a
magic
module interfacing to libmagic.
- Add a
uuid
module for manipulation of UUIDs,
interfacing to <uuid/uuid.h>
on unix
and to CoCreateGuid()
on windows.
- Add a
serial
module to control serial devices using
<termios.h>
on unix and
SetCommState()
on windows.
Segmentation faults
Any hard crash (segmentation fault, bus error etc) is a bug in CLISP.
See CLISP
bug tracker.
Ongoing tasks
- Searching for Common Lisp packages which do not run on CLISP and
porting them to CLISP.
- Translate
CLISP messages into new languages and update the existing
translatons.
New features
- CLISP has an almost-working multithreading.
The only major missing thing is thread-safe hash tables, which is a
big issue because they are used internally by CLOS and thus should
not be lockable.
The current implementation should be replaced with
lock-free open-addressing ones
The hardest part in this reimplementation is integration with GC
because of weak relations.
This is a good project for the
Google Summer of Code.
- CLISP offers a module that
interfaces to Matlab but no module that interfaces to
Octave - the free replacement to Matlab.
This is ideologically intolerable to the GNU party committee (despite the
fact that Octave does not offer a C API yet), so you are hereby invited to
volunteer to implement the Matlab C API for Octave and then make sure that
the CLISP Matlab module works with that new Octave C API.
- Add IEEE
NaNs and infinities the CLISP floating numbers.
This may look like a very "unlispish" feature until you
realise how useful they are, e.g., when extending
log
to 0,
which comes useful when calculating odds, see, e.g.,
clocc/src/cllib/bayes.lisp.
- Embed CLISP
into your favorite application, e.g., VIM,
Firefox,
Gnumeric, or
OpenOffice.
This might require some additional API in CLISP, which we will be
happy to add.
- native file compilation (e.g., bytecodes → C or
LLVM assembly or
GCC IR)
- native just-in-time compilation
(Yann Dauphin added JITC
via lightning),
more work needed to improve performance.
- compilation to JVM (this was thought to be important 10 years ago when the
main task of the computer industry was perceived to be speeding up JVM, so
we wanted to ride the wave, this might still be useful, but has a rather
low priority)
- GUI (e.g., wxCL)
- SSL bindings (note
cl+ssl) and
an HTTPS
client.
- LDAP and
gnome-config support in
modules/dirkey
Infrastructure
- Use
libtool
to produce lisp.so
(lisp.dll
on woe32) instead of lisp.run
(lisp.exe
on woe32).
- Use
dlopen
(LoadLibrary
on woe32)
instead of exec
(CreateProcess
on woe32)
to start a linking set in clisp
(clisp.exe
on woe32). This is related to embeddability.
- Upgrade the Implementation notes
DocBook infrastructure from
v4 to v5.
See also