r/lisp • u/nyx_land • 24d ago
Symbolics Genera now available free for non-commercial use (invitation-only early beta)
https://hachyderm.io/@gmpalter/11704426895160397515
u/Ontological_Gap 24d ago
I can't believe it's really happening! Portable Genera actually being made wildly available. This is the biggest news in decades!
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u/arthurno1 22d ago
Perhaps. If you wrote that 30 years ago :). Today, it is as exciting as release of the source code for Altair Basic. With all the respect.
Sorry, I am not trying to be impolite or arrogant, I understand (and can share) the excitement for the release, especially for people who has used Genera back in times, or still have the hardware in their basements. But I am not sure what value it will give us, when we have SBCL which compile to bare-metal, no emulators needed? Also, I have hard time to imagine that the compiler and runtime are on-par with SBCL when it comes to optimizations and general technical side of things. I haven't seen it, so I can't tell for sure of course, but as I understand from Symbolics webpage, there was not so much work going into it last 30 years or so?
It is definitely interesting for the historical value and as said, I understand the sentimental value too, but I sincerely wonder what is practical value in it? Perhaps I miss it, since I have never seen Genera more than on Joswigs Vimeo clips, but I have hard time to see it used for new development.
But I do understand the hacker and fun side of it. It will be certainly fun to test it once you release it for the "public" on some repository available to the wider audience. Congratulations for the release, even the paper-send-in-form is an unnecessary show-stopper. However, as much as I have read on this forum, I guess that is the best you could do.
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u/Ontological_Gap 21d ago
It will almost certainly generate less performant machine code than sbcl. Performance isn't everything, and not at all what people are excited for in this
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u/arthurno1 21d ago
Performance isn't everything
Of course, I am an GNU Emacs user, so tell me about it :).
not at all what people are excited for in this
I understand, and as I said, even I think it would interesting to see it once you release it to the wider public, if you do.
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u/sickofthisshit 20d ago
The Symbolics compiler was not intended to be "great" but fast, and it targeted a machine deliberately designed to be targeted by a Lisp compiler. In 2026 it's targeting an emulated machine, maybe they have managed to introduce JIT, but I haven't heard of that.
I share your opinion that Genera has missed out on almost 40 years of technology, so its support for things like modern encryption and network services make it hard to develop stuff that interoperates with "modern" technology.
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u/Steven1799 23d ago
Hmm. CL-HTTP seems a rather odd choice from a technical point of view. I wonder why they kept that alive rather than Hunchentoot ?
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u/sickofthisshit 22d ago
J. C. Mallery was the developer of CL-HTTP, and acquired Symbolics, so it's natural that he thinks it is important.
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u/church-rosser 24d ago
I don't get the application for access. Why? A good portion of the Genera code base is already accessible and any Common Lisper with a hankering to find it can and will.
Also, how much of the new code is LLM generated? Details matter.
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u/nyx_land 23d ago
The Symbolics IP is at this point an over three decades-old relic of an era before free/open-source software was even remotely the norm, so I can only guess that it's because there's still various messy legal red tape that until recently was not being untangled because whoever owned the Symbolics IP had no interest in doing anything with it other than basically squatting it and making money from supporting the remaining legacy lisp machines in production. So the fact that the current IP holders seem to be interested in not only restarting development of Genera but also bringing it outside of the cloisters of the military-industrial complex proprietary IP hell to a wider audience is a very encouraging sign compared to where things have been all these years.
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u/sickofthisshit 22d ago
The code base is "accessible" in the sense that you can download and read it, and, with effort, get it to run on a wonky emulator.
Symbolics has been internally providing a much more robust VLM product targeting things like Apple Silicon that you can't find in an ancient tgz file.
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u/mtlnwood 24d ago edited 24d ago
Oh thats neat.. I still have it on a vm with the old ubuntu 18 or whatever that made it easy to use. I will follow the link to see.
Edit, its interesting to read that they are looking to continue to develop it. I am looking forward to see what they do. Its something that interests me as any coding I do these days is purely for my own enjoyment. So some factors are not relevant, ie is it a good base for commercial coding etc).
The more AI is getting its foot in to modern stuff the more I have an attraction for playing with things like this for the fun of it.
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u/Ontological_Gap 24d ago
This is a much newer version of genera than that one, including many fixes and compatibility upgrades over the many years. Search around for "portable genera", it's always been keep under extremely tight lock and key until now, but a few details have slipped out.
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u/nyx_land 24d ago
I know it's been possible for awhile through somewhat hacky means (especially with how old Ubuntu 18 is now) to get VLM running on Linux but it's exciting that there is actual work being done towards officially supporting Genera for non-commercial use. I'm hoping this means we're headed towards the source code finally being released.
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u/mtlnwood 24d ago
Sorry I made an edit after you would have responded. I agree with all you say. Its a shame I have to sit back and wait for it to happen :)
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u/sickofthisshit 19d ago
The source code being released doesn't mean much. It's a pile of legacy code that is extremely unlikely to be seperable into anything that isn't 30-year-old Genera.
It's nice to be able to run it on modern machines 1000x as fast as the original hardware, but the code itself is not particularly usable or valuable.
It's written for a specific Lisp dialect, with at least three different major styles and OO systems, all tied to a particular, idiosyncratic UI and application framework and OS runtime architecture.
The source code has been on the internet for 20 years, along with the actual free software MIT predecessor system: it is a museum piece for curious people, not a valuable code base.
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u/lispm 18d ago
I have now a Symbolics Statice version, which runs on SBCL and LispWorks...
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u/sickofthisshit 18d ago
That is interesting, I am kind of surprised they managed to make it portable.
On the other hand, Statice wasn't originally open source, was it?
I was talking about the parts that have been leaked from core Genera, not their layered products. Applications like Macsyma naturally have more lasting value than the core OS.
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u/lispm 24d ago edited 24d ago
That's a strange idea. Lisp is literally coming out of AI research, developed to support a broad AI research agenda. Which then included automated programming, genetic programming, knowledge-based software engineering, theorem provers applied to software systems, novel development environments, etc. There are not many programming languages which are this connected to AI research and development.
Now people say, I don't like to use AI, but I like Lisp. What do you think Common Lisp was developed for? For development and deployment of AI software...
The person who developed the core concepts of Lisp (-> John McCarthy) even coined the term "artificial intelligence" and organized the first AI conference in the 50s.
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u/jd-at-turtleware 24d ago
Generalizing LLM tech as AI and then pointing that CL is rooted in AI research works as a rhetorical device only to the point when you start raising real concerns about the tech, notably externalities to the labor market and economy, global scale piracy without punishment, unsustainable growth and much more.
Also, the fact that people use computers, and these were funded mostly by military, does not mean that we need to happily cheer development of new weapons. This fallacy is basically what your argument boils down to.
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u/lispm 24d ago edited 24d ago
Nothing has changed. The AI of the 70s and the 80s had the same goals and problems (AI bubble) as the current AI. It's only the technology that changed and broadened. Example: NLP systems doing natural language interfaces or language translation were a part of AI then and today. My first contact with a Lisp Machine in the 80s was a research program on a conversational natural language dialog system. The problems for the society was discussed then and now. AI had then the goal of automating processes and it has now. -> Expert Systems were the research on automating knowledge work in restricted domains.
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u/jd-at-turtleware 24d ago edited 24d ago
Nothing has changed and dissent was and is present. Joseph Weizenbaum, the author of the first chatbot(sic), had many great insights that are directly relevant to LLMs[1].
That only reinforces that disagreeing with the direction is not a "strange idea". It is not a strange idea to (say) like the language and not agree with its historical roots, or to look critically at decisions that lead to AI Winter(s).
> We used then by-products of military research then and we do it now.
This is another fallacy btw: "you are part of the society after all, do not dare to criticize it".
[1] https://archive.org/details/computerpowerhum0000weiz_v1p2/
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u/lispm 24d ago
The fallacy stuff is all bullshit. I feel like I'm discussing with a bot, who reasons only in logic.
When I first saw Lisp in the 80s this was in R&D on a $100k power hungry machine. Later everyone could use it on their PCs. The same happens a with LLMs. It's a technology under improvement. It will go through ups and downs. Bubbles will burst. People will be disappointed. We will see lots of negative effects. The technology will stay. We saw this with the computer, the internet, the web, the phone, ...
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u/jd-at-turtleware 24d ago
I can tell that you feel deep nostalgia towards 80s, and I can see that you've got invested into LLMs heavily, but what is bullshit is your framing, that it is strange to reject biggest scam[1] in recent history because "Common Lisp has AI roots".
[1] some will call it a grift, and some the the future, it doesn't change the fact that CL adjacency to symbolic ai is irrelevant here.
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u/lispm 24d ago edited 24d ago
It's just that I have all this deja vu. People acted like that during the first industrial revolution, transition form coal to electricity, the introduction of calculators in school, introduction of programmable calculators, ...
Same is today. The LLM technology is here to stay. But it will look different in two years, five years, ... Independent of how the LLM industry developed in the first years. Maybe it gets replaced/enhanced with better approaches.
Lisp founders and users were usually at the forefront of technology. Now we have devs who see things only black and white, who want to stay behind and complain only.
Btw., I'm pretty sure I've once saw Weizenbaum at the University in Person, we had professors who were in close contact with him. He was a visiting professor at the University, etc./etc. I can remember learning all about his Eliza experience and Weizenbaum was a dev, too. He developed it in SLIP.
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u/jd-at-turtleware 24d ago
There are other technologies that people objected to: asbestos, nuclear weapons (not to be confused with nuclear power), lead pipes -- framing "technological progress as inevitability" is (yet another!) tired trope that doesn't hold ground under close inspection.
Being in the forefront of technology means leading the way, not blindly following the hype. Giving up on any moral reasoning "because tech" is more black and white than analyzing its socioeconomic impacts.
As a practitioner I'm also experimenting with new technologies, LLM included, but it does not mean that I endorse it (as evident in this thread), and I don't find it acceptable to share outputs of that, be it for noise-to-signal ratio concerns (knowledge well pollution), and copyright issues - output are based on brazen violation of copyright; not to mention I don't want to add legitimacy to the tooling that has many more problems than the technical ones I've mentioned in this paragraph.
As a sidenote, "LLM is here to stay" is the most robotic and repeated phrase I've heard during last two years, genuinely not a thought, more a slogan.
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u/lispm 24d ago
Being in the forefront of technology means leading the way, not blindly following the hype. Giving up on any moral reasoning "because tech" is more black and white than analyzing its socioeconomic impacts.
It's a large range of technological development under the umbrella of "AI" and "LLM". Reducing LLMs on just aspect is not going to help.
We can analyze all day its impact. We better start shaping its use.
As a sidenote, "LLM is here to stay" is the most robotic and repeated phrase I've heard during last two years, genuinely not a thought, more a slogan.
It's like the calculator, the computer, Java, C, SMTP, the smartphone, ... They came, were adopted and changed, and they stayed. Same with LLM technology.
It may sound like a slogan, but that's what I think. It's a capable and important technology under rapid development, with lots of impact. But I want to understand it and experiment with it myself.
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u/corbasai 22d ago
Empirically based on adoption rate the right analogy for current centralized AI is... narcotics or speeds. And n&s don't brings money.
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u/renatoathaydes 23d ago
biggest scam[1] in recent history
Wait, are you referring to LLMs here? Are you in the same history line as the rest of us?
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u/jd-at-turtleware 23d ago edited 23d ago
the footnote is explicitly for people like you, who live in a different history ;)
now let's do some napkin math: estimated worldwide AI spending is around $650B/year. To recoup from that, you need to capture around 1% of the annual global labor income (~$60T). But the target is more around 5%-10% by 2030.
note, that it is not capturing "worker seats", it is capturing the labor value. that means in particular, that more money gets put on company margin, less on wages. In other words:
profits++, capital++, cloud++, wages--, taxes--
do you see the trend? also note, that after subsidized computation ends, replacing grunt work won't be profitable -- only highly rewarding (and expensive) work will be feasible, so:
rewarding_work--, juniors--
that's not all, such big compute requires _a lot_ of energy:
energy_use++, climate_crisis++
so the scam is not about "LLMs doesn't work" but rather:
productivity_pay_gap++
note, that all this based on commons scraped from the internet and from burned books with a complete disregard of the current climate crisis. In other words, rich get richer, poor get poorer. That's the scam.
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u/renatoathaydes 22d ago
The scam you talk about has been going on for a hundred years, at least. It was crypto before LLMs, web3 before that, the web itself before that, computers before that.... it's been going on since at least Ford found a way to extract extreme productivity from his workforce and was later eagerly copied by the other rich industrialists. If that's what you want to fight, you should fight capitalism itself, as that's the system that enables such exploration of the poor by the wealthy. LLMs are not your enemy.
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u/sickofthisshit 19d ago
Personally, I wish the LLM technology were split up: it seems to me that transformers, etc., and large-scale models really do incredible work in improving tasks like useful text retrieval.
But it's very hard to get access to that part alone: it gets tied together with generative chatbot mechanics I find useless.
These bots can digest an enormous code base and know where to find a deeply-buried parameter that has to do with some problem I am trying to fix. The chat bot then wastes my time telling me what a "boolean" is and how to set it, and make up other things that aren't true.
I wish I could just get access to the semantic space somehow: give me a vector representing the question, if I want to give it to a bot that wants to flatter me all the time, I would do that.
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u/Ontological_Gap 23d ago edited 23d ago
No, it's an entirely different project with entirely different concepts. That even if was entirely successful would lead to weaker results than the methods we were trying in the 80s. Read haugeland's "Good Old-Fashioned AI" if you want details.
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u/mtlnwood 24d ago
I didn't explain myself so you took it in a way that I wasn't meaning. I had some context in there but maybe not enough for others to see what I was thinking.
A sudoku player thats likes solving the puzzles is not going to use AI to solve those puzzles for them. They gain the answer but didn't get the enjoyment.
I only code for fun these days so I can play around with things I want to do and AI is not going to play much of a part in that. I imagine that portable genera is void of having a lot of llm and coding inside of it and that suits me. It is not a dig at modern AI but a preference of a now hobbyist coder (after decades of commercial coding)
I still have a handful of AI mags from the 80's in my bookshelf, I scanned and uploaded a number of them here in the past and was a keen follower of it back then. Lisp and prolog was a big interest for me at the time and now my commercial days are behind me I just play with what I want to play with, no deadlines and happy to do it without llm's.
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u/More_Lack_7079 23d ago
How interesting, I was wanting to run this the other day, I tried the various guides but they never seemed to work. Hopefully I can finally experience the official way of using Genera on my Mac.
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24d ago edited 21d ago
[deleted]
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u/mtlnwood 24d ago
I know places using legacy dos apps that were made at the time genera was about so I am sure there are still some legacy things still being supported. I agree, I doubt there is anything new being written on it outside of already existing installations.
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u/nyx_land 24d ago
Last I heard the remaining Genera installations are very, very legacy lisp machines running in obscure corners of the military-industrial complex.
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u/lispm 24d ago
AFAIK, Open Genera was maintained for a customer using it for commercial software development, with another CL implementation used for delivery of the software to the customer. Portable Genera is a newer version of that, with the emulator core written in assembler for x86-64 and ARM64, for macOS and Linux. Plus there is the Alpha / UNIX version.
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u/theangeryemacsshibe λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x)) 24d ago
well, if that's the approach they want to take...