About

I was recently consider using Symbolics Open Genera as my second programming environment.

Pros:

nice developing experience
can learn a lot from its design for building my future projects

Cons:

missing some useful packages (for example, CL-PPCRE for regexp, QuickLisp for package managing, …)
toooooooooo much documentation (manual) to read (good, yet a little difficult to read them all)
some protocol is bit old and not function well (NFSv2 and NFSv3, which made me headache for days)

But any way, I thought it was generally a charming experience. Right now, I've made OpenGenera running successfully within the QEMU and Docker (little faulty due to NFSv2/3, documentation reading is not avaliable… ).

The future route will be like:

porting some existing Common Lisp library (SCIGRAPH and CL-PPCRE in this post) as Genera System
build a RPC interface for distribute computation to host machine for heavy computations (or I think I'll just copy the code from Genera to SBCL and they could run nicely)
some reverse engineering on vbin? (possibly, I am not sure if I'd be able to do so)
… (if I'd be free)

So here is how I port SCIGRAPH and CL-PPCRE:

SCIGRAPH

Since it's designed with support for Genera, the portation is easy. So the process looks like this:

add scigraph.system under sys.cst/site, with things like:
```
;;; -*- Mode: LISP; Syntax: Common-lisp; Package: USER; Base: 10; Lowercase: Yes -*-

(sct:set-system-source-file :scigraph "SYS:SCIGRAPH;SYSDCL")
```
this will tell Genera where to look for system definition file. In this case, the file should be sys.sct/scigraph/sysdcl.lisp

set the load package method at sys.sct/scigraph/sysdcl.lisp

maybe you could refer to sys.sct/concordia/concordia.lisp for how to write defsystem to specify the system compoents.

;;; -*- Mode: LISP; Package: USER; Syntax: Common-Lisp; Base: 10 -*-

(in-package :user)

;;; ...

(defsystem scigraph
	   (:pretty-name         "Scigraph"
	    :default-pathname    "SYS:SCIGRAPH;"
	    :source-category     :basic
	    :distribute-sources  T
	    :distribute-binaries NIL)
  (:module components (scigraph-dwim scigraph-core)
	   (:type :system))
  (:serial components))

(defsubsystem scigraph-dwim
	      (:pretty-name         "SciGraph DWIM"
	       :default-pathname    "SYS:SCIGRAPH;DWIM;"
	       :source-category     :basic
	       :distribute-sources  T
	       :distribute-binaries NIL)
  (:serial
    "package"
    ;; ... load from load-dwim.lisp ...
    ))

;;; ...

the original system loading process is defined in load-dwim.lisp and load-scigraph.lisp.

In short: to port a system to Genera, just rewrite the original load-*.lisp to sysdcl.lisp to define a system in Genera.

to load Scigraph, should Load System CLIM, Load System Genera-CLIM, Load System Postscript-CLIM, Load System CLX-CLIM before Load System Scigraph.
test with (graph:make-demo-frame) to see if loaded properly

Note: mostly working, but seemed to be a little buggy?

Note: after I've done this, I found something like dwim-system.lisp and scigraph-system.lisp, I think which could be used as the porper loader of sysdcl.lisp instead. for example, maybe I could write scigraph.system like:

(sct:set-system-source-file :scigraph "SYS:SCIGRAPH;DWIM;DWIM-SYSTEM")
(sct:set-system-source-file :scigraph "SYS:SCIGRAPH;SCIGRAPH;SCIGRAPH-SYSTEM")

But anyway, it works and I don't see urgency to use it…

CL-PPCRE

Since OpenGenera doesn't support and has some feature missing? for example:

(declare (fixnum ...)) will not be treated like (declare (type fixnum ...))
(lambda ...) will not be treated like #'(lambda ...) (in SBCL)
(coerce ... 'simple-string) will not work properly, so I changed them as (coerce ... 'string) to make it compile pass…
not sure how this will affect the performance… and not sure if need to change more…

I think I have to change these codes to make it work on OpenGenera. Meanwhile, I thought it would be difficult to keep consistency with current CL-PPCRE version. (maybe you could call it in Chinese “魔改”).

Just test with Advent Of Code 2024 Day 3's problem:

;; -*- Package: CL-PPCRE -*-

(let ((input "xmul(2,4)%&mul[3,7]!@^do_not_mul(5,5)+mul(32,64]then(mul(11,8)mul(8,5))")
      (sum   0))
  (do-matches-as-strings (m "mul\\((\\d{1,3}),(\\d{1,3})\\)" input)
    (let ((mul 1))
      (do-matches-as-strings (d "\\d+" m) (setf mul (* mul (parse-integer d))))
      (incf sum mul)))
  sum) ; => 161

Finally

So, this two patches has now been ported into Symbolics OpenGenera (#05e6f03 and #66dc2c3). Though its shame to declaim, but I could tell there must be some hidden bugs since I'm still not a mature Lisp Programmer. Contributions and helps are welcomed.

So, what to do next?

port or make some simple HTTP downloader package (maybe dexador or something else), but this would be sure more difficult though
do some simple programming on CLIM (I was always curious about it, but the McCLIM often fail to boot on my macOS)
try to fix Document Examiner and NFSv3 (no clue)
RPC to host PC for heavy computation (maybe should base on TCP/IP)