CIEL

Common Lisp, batteries included.

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CIEL Is an Extended Lisp

STATUS: highly WIP, the API WILL change, but it is usable.

I am dogfooding it in public and private projects.

What is this ?

CIEL is a ready-to-use collection of libraries.

It's Common Lisp, batteries included.

It comes in 3 forms:

• a binary, to run CIEL scripts: fast start-up times, standalone image, built-in utilities.
• a simple full-featured REPL for the terminal.
• a Lisp library and a core image.

Questions, doubts? See the FAQ.

NEW: we now have a Docker file.

Rationale

One of our goals is to make Common Lisp useful out of the box for mundane tasks -by today standards. As such, we ship libraries to handle JSON or CSV, as well as others to ease string manipulation, to do pattern matching, to bring regular expressions, for threads and jobs scheduling, for HTTP and URI handling, to create simple GUIs with nodgui (Tk-based, nice theme), and so on. You can of course do all this without CIEL, but then you have to install the library manager first and load these libraries into your Lisp image every time you start it. Now, you have them at your fingertips whenever you start CIEL.

We also aim to soften the irritating parts of standard Common Lisp. A famous one, puzzling for beginners and non-optimal for seasoned lispers, is the creation of hash-tables. We include the dict function from the Serapeum library (which we enhanced further with a pull request):

CIEL-USER> (dict :a 1 :b 2 :c 3)

which prints:

(dict
 :A 1
 :B 2
 :C 3
)

In standard Common Lisp, the equivalent is more convoluted:

  (let ((ht (make-hash-table :test 'equal)))
    (setf (gethash :a ht) 1)
    (setf (gethash :b ht) 2)
    (setf (gethash :c ht) 3)
    ht)
;; #<HASH-TABLE :TEST EQUAL :COUNT 3 {1006CE5613}>
;; (and we don't get a readable representation, so our example is not even equivalent)

Moreover, we bring:

• a full featured REPL on the terminal and
• scripting capabilities, see more below.

See the documentation.

Install

You will probably need the following system dependencies (names for a Debian Bullseye system):

libmagic-dev libc6-dev gcc  # from magicffi
zlib1g-dev # from deploy for SBCL < 2.2.6

If your SBCL version is >= 2.2.6 you might want to use the more performant libzstd-dev library instead of zlib1g-dev.

libzstd-dev # from deploy for SBCL >= 2.2.6

On Linux:

inotify-tools

On MacOS:

fsevent

With Quicklisp

You need a Lisp implementation and Quicklisp installed.

You need the system dependencies above.

You need a CL implementation with a recent enough version of ASDF to support package-local nicknames. As of March, 2023, this is not the case with SBCL 2.2.9. Here's a one-liner to update ASDF:

$ ( cd ~/common-lisp/ && wget https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/archives/asdf-3.3.5.tar.gz  && tar -xvf asdf-3.3.5.tar.gz && mv asdf-3.3.5 asdf )

CIEL is not on Quicklisp yet, but it is on Ultralisp.

So, either clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/ciel-lang/CIEL ~/quicklisp/local-projects/CIEL

And install dependencies missing or outdated from Quicklisp:

$ ( cd ~/quicklisp/local-projects/CIEL && make ql-deps )

Or install the Ultralisp distribution and pull the library from there:

(ql-dist:install-dist "http://dist.ultralisp.org/" :prompt nil)

Then, load the .asd file (with asdf:load-asd or C-c C-k in Slime), quickload "ciel":

(ql:quickload "ciel")

and enter the ciel-user package:

(in-package :ciel-user)

To build CIEL's binary and core image, use

$ make build

This creates the bin/ directory with the ciel binary.

$ make image

This creates the ciel-core Lisp image.

With a core image

You need a Lisp implementation, but you don't need Quicklisp.

Build a core image for your lisp with all CIEL's dependencies:

sbcl --load build-image.lisp

and use it:

sbcl --core ciel-core --eval '(in-package :ciel-user)'

Then you can configure Slime to have the choice of the Lisp image to start. See below in *Use CIEL at startup

We will distribute ready-to-use core images can not distribute core images, you must build it yourself.

With a binary. Use CIEL's custom REPL.

You don't need anything, just download the CIEL executable and run it. You need to build the core image yourself though.

• we provide an experimental binary for some systems: go to https://gitlab.com/vindarel/ciel/-/pipelines, download the latest artifacts, unzip the ciel-v0-{platform}.zip archive and run ciel-v0-{platform}/ciel.

CIEL is currently built for the following platforms:

Platform	System Version (release date)
debian	Debian Buster (2019)
void	Void Linux glibc (2023-05)

To build it, clone this repository and run make build.

Start it with ./ciel.

With Docker

We have a Dockerfile.

Build your CIEL image:

docker build -t ciel .

The executable is built in /usr/local/bin/ciel of the Docker image.

Get a CIEL REPL:

docker run --rm -it ciel /usr/local/bin/ciel

Run a script on your filesystem:

docker run --rm -it ciel /usr/local/bin/ciel path/to/your/lisp/script.lisp

Run a built-in script:

docker run --rm -it ciel /usr/local/bin/ciel -s simpleHTTPserver

So, save you some typing with a shell alias:

alias ciel="sudo docker run --rm -it ciel /usr/local/bin/ciel"

Usage

Scripting

Note

this is brand new! Expect limitations and changes.

Get the ciel binary and call it with your .lisp script:

$ ciel script.lisp

Use the #!/usr/bin/env ciel shebang line to directly call your files:

$ ./script

Call built-in scripts:

$ ciel -s simpleHTTPserver 9000

See available built-in scripts with --scripts.

See the scripts documentation.

Terminal REPL

CIEL ships a terminal REPL for the terminal which is more user friendly than the default SBCL one:

• it has readline capabilities, meaning that the arrow keys work by default (woohoo!) and there is a persistent history, like in any shell.
• it has multiline input.
• it has TAB completion.
• it handles errors gracefully: you are not dropped into the debugger and its sub-REPL, you simply see the error message.
• it has optional syntax highlighting.
• it has an optional lisp critic that scans the code you enter at the REPL for instances of bad practices.
• it has a shell pass-through: try !ls.
• it has documentation lookup shorthands: use :doc symbol or ? after a symbol to get its documentation: ciel-user> (dict ?.
• it has developer friendly macros: use (printv code) for an annotated trace output.
• it integrates the lisp critic.
• and it defines some more helper commands.

The CIEL terminal REPL loads the ~/.cielrc init file at start-up if present. Don't load it with --no-userinit.

See more in the documentation.

Run ciel with no arguments:

$ ciel

CIEL's REPL version 0.1.5
Read more on packages with readme or summary. For example: (summary :str)
Special commands:
  %help => Prints this general help message
  %doc => Print the available documentation for this symbol.
  %? => Gets help on a symbol <sym>: :? str
  %w => Writes the current session to a file <filename>
  %d => Dumps the disassembly of a symbol <sym>
  %t => Prints the type of a expression <expr>
  %q => Ends the session.
  %lisp-critic => Enable or disable the lisp critic. He critizes the code you type before compiling it.
  %edit => Edit a file with EDITOR and evaluate it.
Press CTRL-D or type :q to exit

ciel-user>

It is freely based on sbcli.

Lisp library

You can install and quickload CIEL like any other Common Lisp library.

To use it in your project, create a package and "use" ciel in addition of cl:

(defpackage yourpackage
  (:use :cl :ciel))

You can also use generic-ciel, based on generic-cl (warn: generic-ciel is less tested at the moment).

    (defpackage yourpackage
      (:use :cl :generic-ciel))

generic-cl allows us to define our + or equalp methods for our own objects (and more).

Core image: use CIEL in your current developer setup

You can enter the CIEL-USER package when you start your Lisp image from your editor.

A working, but naive and slow-ish approach would be to add this in your ~/.sbclrc:

(ql:quickload "ciel")
(in-package :ciel-user)
(ciel-user-help)

A faster way is to use CIEL's core image and to use SLIME's or your editor's feature to configure multiple Lisps.

You need to:

• build CIEL's core image for your machine (make image),
• add this to your Emacs init file:

(setq slime-lisp-implementations
      `((sbcl    ("sbcl" "--dynamic-space-size" "2000"))  ;; default. Adapt if needed.
        (ciel-sbcl  ("sbcl" "--core" "/path/to/ciel/ciel-core" "--eval" "(in-package :ciel-user)"))))
(setq slime-default-lisp 'ciel-sbcl)

• and start a new Lisp process.
• optional: if you didn't set it as default with slime-default-lisp, then start a new Lisp process with M-- M-x slime (alt-minus prefix), and choose ciel-sbcl. You can start more than one Lisp process from SLIME.

The Lisp process should start instantly, as fast as the default SBCL, you won't wait for the quicklisp libraries to load.

Libraries

We import, use and document libraries to fill various use cases: generic access to data structures, functional data structures, string manipulation, JSON, database access, web, URI handling, GUI, iteration helpers, type checking helpers, syntax extensions, developer utilities, etc.

See the documentation.

To see the full list of dependencies, see the ciel.asd project definition or this dependencies list.

Language extensions

We provide arrow macros, easy type declaratons in the function lambda list, macros for exhaustiveness type checking, pattern matching, etc.

See the documentation.

Final words

That was your life in CL:

and now:

Misc: how to generate the documentation

See src/ciel.lisp and run (generate-dependencies-page-reference).

Contributors

Special big thanks to @cinerion, @themarcelor and everyone who helped (@agam, @patrixl, @bo-tato…).

Lisp?!

• awesome-cl
• the Common Lisp Cookbook
  • editor support (Emacs, Vim, VSCode, Atom, Pulsar, Jetbrains, Sublime, Jupyter notebooks…)
• Lisp companies
• blog posts:
  • these years in Lisp: 2022 in review
  • Python VS Common Lisp, workflow and ecosystem
  • A road to Common Lisp
• 🎥 my Common Lisp course in videos: from novice to efficient programmer, on the Udemy platform.