Hi! And Some Questions

[kismert]

Hi!



I stumbled on to newLISP on the SQLite site. I have always been intrigued by LISP, and I like the pragmatic, minimalist, scripting approach this version takes. The documentation is thorough, the videos are helpful, and the community seems friendly. What's not to like?



But, in researching the site, I have come up with some questions:



1. I was interested in the Windows DLL, but it seems that you can only 'shell out' to newLISP. I was hoping for COM Automation, and while I found mention of it in the forum, I couldn't find anything current in the Modules section. What is the state of COM support in newLISP?



2. I recently came across Dart, which is Google's take at an alternative to Javascript as a web client-side scripting language for browsers. It struck me that a targeted version of newLISP could be an ideal candidate for such a role. How cool would it be to have a newLISP web client interacting with a newLISP web server? Does this idea resonate with anyone?



3. As an extension of #2, I am curious to know how newLISP compares to a modern Javascript implementation like V8. But the benchmarks here look out-of-date, and the Shootout site doesn't list newLISP anymore, so it's hard for me to say. Does anyone have a sense of how the two compare?



Thanks for your time!

-Ken

[cormullion]

JavaScript is worked on by thousands of software engineers around the world, so microseconds are probably being eliminated as we speak; I'd bet it's faster than most interpreted languages as a result. Lutz makes newLISP as fast as he can in his spare time, I expect... :)

[Lutz]

newLISP is comparable in speed to Perl and Python:



http://www.newlisp.org/benchmarks/">http://www.newlisp.org/benchmarks/



I would expect V8 just-in-time compiled JavaScript to be faster.



newLISP is a full dynamic language including complete realization of the data-equals-code paradigm. This limits the extend of compilation possible. newLISP compiles program and data structures into internal LISP-cell tree structures when reading code. This maintains the code-equals-data attribute during runtime.

[kismert]

Thanks for your insight, cormullion and Lutz!

[m35]

1. I was interested in the Windows DLL, but it seems that you can only 'shell out' to newLISP. I was hoping for COM Automation, and while I found mention of it in the forum, I couldn't find anything current in the Modules section. What is the state of COM support in newLISP?

By "COM support in newLISP", do you mean newLISP's ability to work with COM objects, or being able to utilize the newLISP interpreter as a COM object(s)?

[HPW]

I was interested in the Windows DLL, but it seems that you can only 'shell out' to newLISP.....

I was using the DLL over years in different enviroments with success. (neobook,delphi,powerbasic,ruby,pdScript etc.)

You can not only shell out to newlisp and work with the return-value.

You can do calls (import) from newlisp into your enviroment host system also.

newlispCallback was added in 10.3.3 for callback definition.



An option would be to do the COM-access via the host-enviroment.

[kismert]

Thanks for your replies, HPW and m35.

By "COM support in newLISP", do you mean newLISP's ability to work with COM objects, or being able to utilize the newLISP interpreter as a COM object(s)?

m35, I was more thinking about getting newLISP to work with COM objects.



I saw in an earlier post http://newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1983">COM in newLISP that a while back you were working on several approaches to COM automation.



Is your http://www.newlisp.org/modules/various/winscript.lsp.html">winscript module current? Am I correct in thinking that winscript wraps VBScript, which then wraps COM?