Common Lisp has bad marketing (even OCaml has Twitch streamers and "influencers" now), and bad support for general editors, both of which make it a non-starter for most curious people who have an afternoon to try something. But behind all that is magnificent activity for those who got over the initial potential energy barrier. Just to give some examples:
1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors, one of which is merged and open to beta testing. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.
2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Lisp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python, without the baggage of process wrangling and thick RPC (IPC/servers, serialization, ...).
3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged [1], and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [2]. That means Clojure-like seqs.
It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.
[1] https://coalton-lang.github.io/reference/#seq-type
[2] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...
1. SBCL, the most popular open source implementation of Lisp, is seeing potentially two new garbage collectors, one of which is merged and open to beta testing. One of them is a parallel collector written by a university student (!!) which blows my mind.
2. SBCL has better and better support for deploying Lisp as a C-compatible shared library, using SBCL-LIBRARIAN. It makes it play nicer with other applications in C and Python, without the baggage of process wrangling and thick RPC (IPC/servers, serialization, ...).
3. Coalton is another exciting development that allows a Haskell type system and "Lisp-1" functional programming in Common Lisp. That means type classes (or traits), something Lisp hasn't really had a proper notion of, and full type inference. Persistent sequences based off of RRB-trees were recently merged [1], and interestingly, they're implemented purely in Coalton [2]. That means Clojure-like seqs.
It's interesting to see users of Lisp generating the above ideas and libraries, not a special in-group of committees, "official" developers, etc.
[1] https://coalton-lang.github.io/reference/#seq-type
[2] https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/blob/main/library/se...