December 2, 2011

Common Lisp, Web framework, VPS, OSX issues

Goal: 
Develop web apps using common lisp with a web framework in Linux environment.

Environment:

Dev: OSX 10.6 Snow leopard.  

Target: Ubuntu 10.10 on OpenVZ, tiny config, hosted in VPS.


Issues:

 Two widely used common lisp web frameworks and require multi threading: 

  1. weblocks
  2. hunchentoot

(Use quicklisp to install them.) 


1. Dev env:

OSX's CLISP binary doesn't support multithreading.

Tried SBCL, and macport binary does support multithreading.

 
2. Target env:

Ubuntu's CLISP package supports multithreading.  

SBCL install via apt-get failed. There's a problem with memory (don't remember the specific message).  It was due to SBCL's memory requirement, needing 8GB of memory for its GC, but the server only has 512MB with no swap, since openVZ does not give swap.

On dev env - use SBCL, on target, use CLISP.

Some suggested that LISPBOX has Clozure Common LISP and the binary supports multithreading on OSX, therefore use that (lispbox's clozure).  However, on this VPS' Ubuntu, installing LISPBOX seems unnecessarily difficult, due to the LISPBOX binary's age and wouldn't install on VPS' headless Ubuntu 11.04.


Conclusion 

There is an issue with CLISP on OSX , SBCL on OpenVZ based VPS.