As you may or may not now, Erlisp is a project to bring better language
constructs for concurrency to the Lisp programmer. At this stage it's
being written as an Erlang-clone, but I hope to go "beyond Erlang" at
some point.
It�s been over 8 months since I announced Erlisp to the Lisp community,
and I�m sure that I�m not the only one who had hoped that Erlisp would
have come farther in all this time. However, many of you may not even be
aware of the things that /have/ happened, hence this summary.
I�ve implemented (for SBCL):
* Processes as threads.
* Local message sending and receiving.
* API to plug in your own pattern matcher.
Apart from actually writing code, I�ve been taking steps to get
development back on track:
* I�ve switched from GNU Arch to darcs for version control. Darcs is
much easier to use, and in my opinion also conceptually nicer. (For
example there is no difference between a working copy and a repository.)
It�s the first version control system I like to use.
* To get more community interaction, I�ve started a blog [0], and there
is now an Erlisp mailing list [1]. Thanks to Mario Mommer of
Common-Lisp.net for setting it up for me.
* I�ve written a little Bash script that:
- Synchronizes the main Erlisp repository with my local one.
- Uploads a new Erlisp snapshot tarball.
- Sends an e-mail to the mailing list about the new patches in the
repository.
Other noteworthy events are:
* I�ve been contacted by Heow Eide-Goodman of Lisp NYC about Google�s
Summer of Code. Apparently, Lisp NYC is a participating mentoring
organization and they list working on Erlisp as one of their project ideas.
I�m very flattered by all this, but I�m not sure whether I can mentor a
student to work on Erlisp. I�m only figuring this stuff out as I go, so
I�m by no means an expert, and I�m not exactly drowning in spare time
either (not even during the coming summer vacation).
* As part of the website revamping I�ve made a (very primitive) search
mechanism for the Erlisp reference section. There has also been a slow
but steady stream of reference additions over the months.
In the future, Erlisp development progress will be reported on my blog:
[0] http://dirkgerrits.com/
Development can be discussed there, as well as on the mailing list:
[1] http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/erlisp-devel
Kind regards,
Dirk Gerrits