buildLisp.nix

This is a build system for Common Lisp, written in Nix.

It aims to offer an alternative to ASDF for users who live in a Nix-based ecosystem. This offers several advantages over ASDF:

• Simpler (logic-less) package definitions
• Easy linking of native dependencies (from Nix)
• Composability with Nix tooling for other languages
• Effective, per-system caching strategies
• Easy overriding of dependencies and whatnot
• ... and more!

The project is still in its early stages and some important restrictions should be highlighted:

• There is no separate abstraction for tests at the moment (i.e. they are built and run as programs)
• Only SBCL is supported (though the plan is to add support for at least ABCL and Clozure CL, and maybe make it extensible)

Usage

buildLisp exposes four different functions:

• buildLisp.library: Builds a collection of Lisp files into a library.

  parameter	type	use	required?
  name	string	Name of the library	yes
  srcs	list<path>	List of paths to source files	yes
  deps	list<drv>	List of dependencies	no
  native	list<drv>	List of native dependencies	no

  The output of invoking this is a directory containing a FASL file that is the concatenated result of all compiled sources.

• buildLisp.program: Builds an executable program out of Lisp files.

  parameter	type	use	required?
  name	string	Name of the program	yes
  srcs	list<path>	List of paths to source files	yes
  deps	list<drv>	List of dependencies	no
  native	list<drv>	List of native dependencies	no
  main	string	Entrypoint function	no

  The main parameter should be the name of a function and defaults to ${name}:main (i.e. the exported main function of the package named after the program).

  The output of invoking this is a directory containing a bin/${name}.

• buildLisp.bundled: Creates a virtual dependency on a built-in library.

  Certain libraries ship with Lisp implementations, for example UIOP/ASDF are commonly included but many implementations also ship internals (such as SBCLs various sb-* libraries).

  This function takes a single string argument that is the name of a built-in library and returns a "package" that simply requires this library.

• buildLisp.sbclWith: Creates an SBCL pre-loaded with various dependencies.

  This function takes a single argument which is a list of Lisp libraries programs or programs. It creates an SBCL that is pre-loaded with all of that Lisp code and can be used as the host for e.g. Sly or SLIME.

Example

Using buildLisp could look like this:

{ buildLisp, lispPkgs }:

let libExample = buildLisp.library {
    name = "lib-example";
    srcs = [ ./lib.lisp ];

    deps = with lispPkgs; [
      (buildLisp.bundled "sb-posix")
      iterate
      cl-ppcre
    ];
};
in buildLisp.program {
    name = "example";
    deps = [ libExample ];
    srcs = [ ./main.lisp ];
}