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.
Tags / fennel
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.
When it comes to software I prefer things that are simple and small, even though I’m using Emacs. This is mainly the reason why my favorite languages are Clojure and Fennel. However, it doesn’t end on programming languages themselves, I like small tools in general.
Today I would like to talk about three separate tools, and how we can combine them with the power of Emacs.
Quite recently a Fennel game jam happened on itch.io and I’ve decided to participate. I’ve been part of the Fennel community for some years, and every once in a while a lot of people from this community participated in a lisp game jam, but I’ve never made a game before, so I’ve skipped these events.
Lately, I’ve been into understanding asynchronous programming. Since my background is mostly bare metal C, which has no asynchronous programming whatsoever (apart from running on multiple chips, and communicating via shared memory), and I did only a little bit of C++ and Rust, it’s fair to say, that async is pretty new for me.
Today’s topic will be about lazy sequences and how these are different from iterators. I’ve wanted to make an article on this topic for some time, but unfortunately, there was no good way to show the differences using a single language (that I know), because usually, languages stick to one of those things.
Not long ago I posted a small article on a Condition System in Clojure language. In that article, I was mostly trying to understand what a condition system is, and how it can enhance error handling in the code I write. Since that time, I’ve understood this system a lot better, by actually trying it in the Common Lisp language, the place where it came from, as far as I know.
Update:
All the patches1, 2 has been merged into the main branch of Fennel language, so expect to see improved fennelview in next stable release! Some semantics have been altered, so I’ve updated the post a bit to reflect the changes.