Good morning, everyone!
We officially start running out of fingers on a single hand, because this Online Lisp Meeting shall be the fifth one.
We will have a pair of speakers this time: Bonface Munyoki, a software developer with a keen interest in functional programming, and Robert Strandh of SICL fame.
Bonface will talk about Guix Past:
In the field of software development, libraries and tools evolve quickly to keep up with trends, improvements in hardware or to work around discovered/ exposed vulnerabilities. People, across diverse fields, adapt their work by updating the libraries they use to keep up. For scientists, that normally does not happen. Rarely will people maintain the code they wrote for a paper they published; instead, it's the impetus of the reader to reproduce the code based off the paper they read. Outside academic papers, for long-living projects like genenetwork¹, it would be desirable to provide a "time-machine" that enables the user to jump between various past versions. Guix past³ is a project initiated by Guix-HPC² that aims to provide these old, sometimes archived libraries to users with the goal of enabling people to reproduce old builds of software they used a couple of years ago.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeneNetwork ² https://hpc.guix.info/ ³ https://gitlab.inria.fr/guix-hpc/guix-past
Robert will continue talking about creating a Common Lisp implementation with part 2 of his talk.
In this series of presentations, we examine different strategies for creating a Common Lisp implementation, as well as the pros and cons of each strategy.
We assume basic knowledge about how a typical modern operating system (such as Unix) works, and how traditional batch languages (such as C) are compiled and executed on such a system. We furthermore assume medium-level knowledge about Common Lisp.
In part 2, we sketch a possible compiler that generates byte codes, and an abstract machine for interpreting such byte codes.
As before, the talk will be pre-recorded and played back on Twitch, with the ability to comment on the Twitch chat during playback. The videos will make it onto YouTube. In my evening, I plan on organizing an online drink and chat on Jitsi (I know that I promised you that the last time and didn't deliver - I wholeheartedly apologize.) - let's discuss that on #lispcafe.
Date/time/location:
* Date: 22nd July 2020 * Time: 13:00 CEST - https://time.is/en/CEST * Talk: https://www.twitch.tv/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp * Hangout: https://chat.heisig.xyz/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp
Massive thanks to Marco Heisig for providing the Jitsi instance where we can hang out after the talk. (Ha! No one noticed that I called him Macro in the previous mail. Strangely suitable, anyway.)
A mailing list has been created for the purpose of organizing and promoting the online talks. Further announcements will be posted there. See https://mailman.common-lisp.net/listinfo/online-lisp-meets
If you'd like to submit something yourself, please feel free to. The slots are almost always open - there's no real queue for these videos.
BR and see you! Michał "phoe" Herda