Comment by 🚀 stack

Slime on Emacs or Lem needs the CL to run a Swank server, which should be available for gcl, but who knows. And yeah, I understand you don't like Emacs, but I am not sure Lem is the way to go to get started.

Like I said, if you download Portacle you will have everything running in seconds (I just did out of curiosity), with a slightly old SBCL but good enough for Australia, as they say.

BTW, if you are running your own server, I am pretty sure there is a CL gemini server, and you don't need 'cgi' -- you run all kinds of in-process stuff! You can even ssh into a running server and recompile functions or alter variables!

Jan 21 · 11 months ago

5 Later Comments ↓

The problem with scripting SBCL is that you will have something like 100MB reserved (a lot less used), and even compressed the app is going to be like 15MB. I suppose these days it may be ok, since JS backends routinely take 50MB for a 'hello world'...

Another way to do it if you don't control the server is to spin up SBCL with a server process that listens on a socket or something and stays up permanently, and your cgi is a simple connector that reads data and writes it to the lisp server (and reads from it). Your logic will be in Lisp, and CGI tiny.

ohh interesring! that may be an option. yeah slime wouldn't run with .emacs set to gcl. not sure why. sbcl worked fine.

you have to run a few magic lines on the lisp side to install and start-up the swank server, even for SBCL... You can't just 'set' a chosen CL without it. However. you can manually start it on a socket from CL and connect Slime to it, I can help you with that if you can't find examples

But yeah, running a Lisp Gemini server is by far the best option, and a Lisp daemon with CGI requestors is second best if you have no permission to open outside sockets.

This blog post was very helpful and was in line with what you've been saying below. I'd recommend to others starting out.

I'm getting ahead of myself but I want to make an scgi application since CL isn't good for scripting. there's CL-SCGI but what I really want is what it depends on, a unix socket library. I've tried a few and get both the gemini server(molly brown) and the cl scgi app to connect to a socket but I can't read or send data over that stream. I have a few more things to try, but that's where I'm at: molly sending a formatted scgi client request and literally printing the request stream to the console in cl.

Original Post

@stack it seems CL is the one to learn but I don't want to "waste" time learning that when I can't use it here for CGI. been reading up on Janet unsure it's a good intro to Lisp. what do you think?