[antlr-interest] Parsing Lisp into C++

David-Sarah Hopwood david-sarah at jacaranda.org
Mon Sep 28 16:16:33 PDT 2009


Richard Lewis wrote:
> This is not an intellectual exercise or a homework assignment. The Lisp
> in question is a peculiar dialect of CLOS developed for our clients to be
> able to embed scripting behavior in our application suite. The interpreter
> has been tweaked to the point of which we can no longer squeeze out any
> more performance gains. There are 10's of thousands of lines of code
> distributed amongst many clients so changing the language in any way is
> not an option. 
> 
> So the next step is to have it compiled natively.

Hire a Lisp expert. Seriously.

The quality of this language implementation will be crucial to the future
success of your application suite, so the best approach is almost certainly
to choose an existing high-performance, multithreaded Common Lisp
implementation that is suited to embedding, and that can be modified or
extended to support the peculiarities of your existing dialect. Naïve
compilation to C++ is unlikely to provide the performance, functionality,
or robustness that you would get from using a mature language implementation
(*especially* if you want it to be multithreaded). Your company needs an
experienced Lisp hacker who will help you to choose a suitable CL
implementation and modify it as needed.

(I have no personal interest in giving this advice; I don't have nearly
enough Lisp experience.)

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood  ⚥  http://davidsarah.livejournal.com



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