Top all-time · #2442
The Cliffs of Inanity
Personal blog · tromey.com/blogprogrammingsystems
The Cliffs of Inanity is a personal blog at tromey.com about programming and systems. Since 2009, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “ELPA - a package manager for emacs”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tom Tromey's blog for posts on Emacs and Lisp, including his Common Lisp Emacs rewrite and Emacs Lisp JIT work, and point to his ELPA package archive. Little comment on the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- ELPA - a package manager for emacs7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-03-07
- Faster GDB startup4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-04-20
- Emacs and Common Lisp4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-01-08
- The Deletion of gcj2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-03
- Shaggy Dogs and SpiderMonkey Unwinders2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-19
- /elpa/install.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-19
- Emacs and Common Lisp, Part 22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-01-25
What Hacker News says?
Gcj was deleted from GCC in October 2016[1]. So only free option left, AFAIK, is to use mono AOT[2]. [1]: http://tromey.com/blog/?p=911 [2]: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/languages/java/
Comment linking /blog/?p=911
on “The JVM is not that heavy”Submitted The Deletion of gcj as a story · 284 points
HN discussion[continued from above due to size limit] What I'm referring to is incremental recompilation with the following properties: 1. automatic correctness ` - that is, a compiler change not explicitly updating anything related to dependency tracking should at most result in conservative coarser-grained behavior, not unsoundly cause untracked dependencies ` - manual cache invalidation logic is a clear indicator a compiler i…
Comment linking /blog/?p=420
on “The end of Optane is bad news”Submitted JIT Compilation for Emacs Lisp as a story · 180 points
HN discussionTom Tromey started an automated rewrite of Emacs in Common Lisp in 2012, see the announcement at: http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709 I couldn't find any progress report after http://tromey.com/blog/?p=751 so I guess the project has been abandoned early.
Comment linking /blog/?p=751
on “Emacs Lisp's Future”Submitted Faster GDB startup as a story · 82 points
HN discussionI'd love to hear tromey talk about his plans to rebase emacs in CL: http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709
Comment linking /blog/?p=709
on “An Emacs conference”Submitted Emacs JIT Calling Convention as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThanks for your clojure work. I'm using a lot of your stuff and I am grateful you take the time to write and release it. "In the mean time, the link to package.el for Emacs 23 is right at the top of marmalade-repo.org: http://bit.ly/pkg-el23 You know that, but nothing on the page indicates it. In fact, that page leads me to believe it is the same version as tromey.com hosts. It isn't made clear that marmalade is a f…
Comment linking /elpa/install.html
on “Let's just use Emacs”Submitted Emacs and Common Lisp, Part 2 as a story · 78 points
HN discussionWhenever installing software for Emacs, it's usually worth checking ELPA http://tromey.com/elpa/ (which comes installed on Emacs by default now,) to see if the package is there already. The ELPA provide both slime and clojure-mode and they work out of the box with swank-clojure. You'll still need to install Leiningen/Cake with swank-clojure separately, but there isn't much Emacs can do to help there.
Comment linking /elpa/
on “Let's just use Emacs”Submitted Emacs and Common Lisp as a story · 44 points
HN discussionThe authors blog has some extra details (see also the comments) https://tromey.com/blog/?p=982
Comment linking /blog/?p=982
on “Emacs Lisp JIT Compiler”Submitted Emacs and Common Lisp as a story · 40 points
HN discussionAs for installing Slime, Clojure and swank, I love ELPA http://tromey.com/elpa/ Very easy, almost single step. A Leiningen hook seems absent, however. But I never really used Clojure for anything serious.
Comment linking /elpa/
on “Emacs isn't for everyone”Submitted ELPA - a package manager for emacs as a story · 22 points
HN discussionJust want to give a shout out to the people who have been improving GDB's Python API over the years (I think it first appeared about 10 years ago). It seems like a lot of it is due to Tom Tromey? [1] This is a super useful feature that I just used. I have a DSL for algebraic data types in C++ called ASDL [2], and I wrote a very small Python plugin that pretty prints the types. Basically it automates the process of l…
Comment linking /blog/?p=927
on “GDB 10.1”Submitted Faster GDB Startup as a story · 13 points
HN discussion1. I installed ELPA from here: http://tromey.com/elpa/install.html 2. Ran "M-x package-list-packages" 3. Installed clojure-mode, slime, slime-repl, and swank-clojure. Then I rebooted emacs and "M-x slime" just works for me (aquamacs).
Comment linking /elpa/install.html
on “Try Clojure”Submitted Faster GDB Startup as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSee http://tromey.com/blog/?p=778 where he talks about some of the difficulties. tldr; Theoretically it should just work. There are some tricky bits.
Comment linking /blog/?p=778
on “Emacs under Clojure”Submitted Faster GDB Startup as a story · 2 points
HN discussiontromey started a project to port Emacs to pure CL ( http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709 ). Why not help him out instead of dividing the effort?
Comment linking /blog/?p=709
on “Emacs under Clojure”Submitted Shaggy Dogs and SpiderMonkey Unwinders as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA few pointers, from very knowledgeable fellows (warning C code ahead) - https://nullprogram.com/blog/2014/01/04/ - https://tromey.com/blog/?p=305 - http://emacshorrors.com/ - http://emacsninja.com/
Comment linking /blog/?p=305
on “Emacs Users Are Like Terry Pratchett’s Igors (2013)”Submitted Dynamic Pessimization: Shaggy Dogs and SpiderMonkey Unwinders as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's just an integration of ELPA ( http://tromey.com/elpa/ ) which has been around for quite a while. According to the mailing lists Tom Tromey will continue to maintain his archive in parallel. I'm not sure what licensing restrictions he has but I'm fairly sure you don't have to assign copyright as per FSF projects.
Comment linking /elpa/
on “Whats New in Emacs 24”Submitted Emacs and Common Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussion...? http://tromey.com/elpa/
Comment linking /elpa/
on “Planned features for Emacs 24”You mean like elpa? http://tromey.com/elpa/
Comment linking /elpa/
on “Emacs power user screencast”
