I like playing games, but I was always interested in making games too. Recently a Lisp game jam ended, and there are a lot of cool entries, and its a shame I wasn’t able to participate, as I was traveling. And last year I participated in the Fennel Game Jam 1, which was my first game jam, and while the game I made wasn’t anything special, it was a really fun experience.

After I explored asynchronous programming in my first naive implementation a few years ago, I was hooked on the idea of asynchronous communication in programs. Motivated to take this concept further I’ve created the fennel-async library that I’ve shown at FennelConf 2022. While this library works, and I’ve managed to write a simple socket-based REPL and integrate it into Emacs as an experiment, I wasn’t satisfied with the implementation.

In the previous post I’ve described how to define a simple protocol, upgrade the stock Fennel REPL with it, and create a simple client that works with this setup. And at the end, I mentioned that I was working on a proper client implementation and a more robust protocol as part of the fennel-mode package.

Recently I read a post by @nikitonsky about writing a custom REPL for Clojure and Sublime Text. What got my attention was a way of implementing a protocol over a plain Clojure REPL. In the post, Nikita describes a way to “upgrade” the connection by sending code that basically implements a new REPL to the main REPL process.

TIL that Emacs Lisp has had generators since 2016, and generators are a cool feature in any language in my opinion! In short, Emacs has the generator.el package as it’s part since version 25.1. The generators are implemented via transforming code and act like iterators, even most of the functions are called iter-something.

I’ve published two new packages for Emacs: - region-bindings.el and common-lisp-modes.el. Both are quite small and were a part of my configuration for a long time, but after small refactoring of my init.el I’ve decided to extract them. The first one, region-bindings is a from-scratch re-implementation of region-bindings-mode.

Another post in the not-so-series about Emacs configuration. Today I will describe my configuration for managing the compilation-error-regexp-alist variable in a way that is meaningful for the current project I’m working on. Some time ago I faced a problem that the compilation-error-regexp-alist variable contains far too many entries for different languages by default.

I’ve been into clojure.core.async lately, and I like the overall design of this library - it’s simple and easy to understand. However, at work, we use manifold in our projects, mainly because it is supported by the aleph server, which was chosen because it can asynchronously read data coming from the client.

Note: I’m not an expert in type systems, and my knowledge of compilers is limited. This is more of an actual random thought I had for some time, and I’ve just decided to capture it here, not to be used as an argument on static vs dynamic types.

Another year ends, so it’s time to gather my thoughts together and reflect on everything that happened this year. This was a decent year, despite all the bad things that have happened around the world. And it was a very loud year too - one event after another without any breaks, all of which are covered in all of the media.