Hacker News

Older HN users may recall when busy discussions had comments split across several pages. This is because the Arc [1] language that HN runs on was originally hosted on top of Racket [2] and the implementation was too slow to handle giant discussions at HN scale. Around September 2024 Dang et al finished porting Arc to SBCL, and performance increased so much that even the largest discussions no longer need splitting. The server is unresponsive/restarting a lot less frequently since these changes, too, despite continued growth in traffic and comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41679215

[1] https://paulgraham.com/arc.html

[2] https://racket-lang.org/

How come it is named like that? It's a product of some old school consortium?

I know that ford,gm etc also made some R&D into software

Can we get a "(1999)" date on this, please? Only half joking becuase I see Common Lisp and, sure, I upvote ... but honestly, what's the purpose of this HN submission without context?

SBCL is obviously fantastic but let's contrast with another popular implementation: Embeddable Common Lisp. https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/

Top marks for SBCL performance but ECL can be a better fit for embedding into mobile applications, running on lighter weight hardware, and in the browser.

While great option, LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp should not be overlooked, too many focus on SBCL + Emacs and then complain about Lisp tooling.

My favorite bit of SBCL trivia is the name: this is descended from Carnegie Mellon's build.

Steel. Bank.

[dead]

What about it?