Quicklisp gems

amoroso

Common Lisp may not have the library ecosystems of mainstream languages but Quicklisp offers quite a lot of code. What are your favorite Quicklisp packages that are useful, well designed, and well documented, especially among the lesser known or niche packages?

marcoxa

amoroso everything I have in Quicklisp, obviously :)

vindarel

I needed to manipulate CSV files only recently and I tried lisp-stat's Data Frame. It's a pleasure to use and it's very well documented.

https://lisp-stat.dev/docs/manuals/data-frame/

vindarel

A lesser-known one, Periods, by John Wiegley, to manipulate time, built on top of local-time, got visible online documentation only this year.

https://lisp-maintainers.github.io/periods/

I like it (but don't need it so often).

amoroso

Periods is nice as it combines versatile primitives and means of combining them.

khinsen

I don't know if FSet is niche, but I like it! There's good-enough documentation, but more importantly the code itself is very readable.

CLOG is another favorite of mine. Well documented, works as advertised, and the implementation is easy to understand.

ggxx

I think lparallel provides many useful abstractions for programming with threads. Their domain lparallel.org expired earlier this year, and there was a little group effort to salvage and rehost the documentation.

The people who are in the sharplispers organization can be found in #commonlisp on irc.libera.chat.

amoroso

CLAWK, an AWK implementation embedded in Common Lisp, is probably already know but it's worth mentioning as a good example of an embedded mini language as well as a library useful in itself.

crmsnbleyd

Might be a bit more niche in appeal, but april is an APL subset embedded in lisp. Useful for array operations, talks to the embedding lisp well, and is a pretty good APL implementation.

carlgay

I recently discovered https://codeberg.org/shinmera/for and, while I admit I haven't actually used it in a real project yet, it looks like a nice replacement for loop, do, do*, dotimes, and dolist. It doesn't have equivalents to everything in loop but I prefer not to use the more esoteric parts of loop anyway.

khinsen

I hadn't seen this before. It looks like an evolution of loop, in contrast to various other iteration libraries that most of all don't want to resemble loop at all.

Has anyone done a comparison of the recent players in the iteration game? iterate and series are well discussed, but there are a few others.

ggxx

For people who don't like ORMs, this great.
https://github.com/ruricolist/cl-yesql

It's a port of Clojure's Yesql, but it's implemented in a uniquely CL way using another library called Vernacular.