Yesterday the 8th European Lisp Symposium finished. In short it was a great experience (I was there the first time, but hopefully not the last). The variety and quality of talks was great, a good number of people attended both the actual talks as well as both(!) dinners, so there were lots of opportunities to exchange thoughts and quiz people, including on Lisp. Also except for one talk I believe all talks happened, which is also a very good ratio.
For the talks I still have to go through the proceedings a bit for details, but obviously the talk about the Lisp/C++ interoperability with Clasp was (at least for me) long awaited and very well executed. Both the background information on the origins, as well as the technical description on the use of LLVM and the integration of multiple other projects (ECL, SICL, Cleavir) were very interesting and informative.
There were also quite a number of Racket talks, which was surprising to me, but given the source of these projects it makes sense since the GUI is pretty good. VIGRA, although it's a bit unfortunate name, looks pretty nice. The fact that the bindings to a number of languages are available and in the case of the Lisps make the interaction a lot easier is good to see, so it might be a good alternative to OpenCV. It's also encouraging that students enjoy this approach and are as it seems productive with the library.
P2R, the Processing implementation in Racket is similarly interesting as there is a huge community using Processing and making programming CAD applications easier via a known environment is obviously nice and should give users more opportunities in that area.
If I remember correctly the final Racket talk was about constraining application behaviour, which was I guess more of a sketch how application modularity and user-understandable permissions could be both implemented and enforced. I still wonder about the applicability in e.g. a Lisp or regular *nix OS.
The more deeply technical talks regarding the garbage collector (be it in SBCL, or Allegro CL) were both very interesting in that normally I (and I imagine lots of people) don't have (a chance) to get down to that level and therefore learning about some details about those things is appreciated.
Same goes for the first talk by Robert Strandh, Processing List Elements in
Reverse Order, which was really great to hear about in the sense that I
usually appreciate the :from-end parameter of all the sequence functions and
still didn't read the details of the interaction between actual order of
iteration vs. the final result of the function. Then again, the question
persists if any programs are actually processing really long lists in
reverse in production. Somehow the thought that even this case is optimised
would make me sleep easier, but then again, the tradeoff of maintainable code
vs. performance improvements remains (though I don't think that the presented
code was very unreadable).
Escaping the Heap was nice and it'll be great to see an open-sourced library for shared memory and off-heap data structures, be it just for special cases anyway.
Lots of content, so I doubt I'll get to the lightning talks. It'll be just this for now then. Hopefully I have time/opportunity to go to the next ELS or another Lisp conference; I can only recommend going.
