We recently released Engine 3.3.7, with support for new and old devices. Let’s look at what 3.3.7 includes.

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Scheme (and thus GoLisp) is lexically scoped. This is implemented by the creation of a lexical environment (aka symbol table) for each lexical scope:

• function/lambda/macro invocations, which holds parameters and any local definitions
• let structures, which hold the let bindings
• do structures, which hold the do bindings

Functions and lambdas capture a reference to the environment in which they were defined, so they always have access to its bindings (that’s a closure, btw).

Each environment has a connection to its containing environment, and can override/hide bindings in outer scopes. When a symbol is evaluated, the most local environment is searched first. If a binding for the system isn’t found there, the containing environment is searched. This continues until a binding for the sybol is found or we go all the way to the global environment and still can’t find a binding.

Section 3.2 of [1] does a great job of explaining environments in Scheme, which is the basis for environments in GoLisp.

In Scheme, some environments are more important than others, mainly as they tend to be larger, long lived, and serve as the root of many other environments as a program runs. These are known as top level environments. Specifially, these are the global environment (the only environment that is contained by nothing), and any environments directly below it in the environment tree. The REPL runs in one such environment, which effectively sandboxes it, protecting the bindings in the global environment from corruption.

In standard Scheme, environments are first class objects. That is, they can be passed around, returned, manipulated, etc. I’ve recently added this ability to GoLisp, along with the majority of the environment manipulation functions from Scheme. These are described below.

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We recently released Engine 3.3.6.1, with new features and new devices. Let’s look at what 3.3.6.1 includes.

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We recently released Engine 3.3.4, with new features and new devices. Let’s look at what 3.3.4 includes.

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We recently released Engine 3.3.3, with new features and new devices. Let’s look at what 3.3.3 includes.

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When I first wrote GoLisp I wasn’t overly concerned with space efficiency as the immediate use was quite small scale. I was also fairly new to Go at the time. As time has gone on, we have been writing more and more production code in GoLisp. Space and time performance is something that we would now like to improve as we go forward.

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Recently, I had the pleasure of designing for the SteelSeries Sentry Streaming Overlay. The Sentry Streaming overlay is a software application that allows viewers to see where the user is looking when they play and stream their favorite games.

Since this was the first product of it’s kind at SteelSeries, there were many Design and Usability decisions to be made. Let’s go through the list and discuss how we went about addressing them.

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We recently released Engine 3.3.2, with new features and new devices. Let’s look at what 3.3.2 includes.

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GoLisp now has a few basic concurrency primitives built on top of Go’s goroutines and channels.

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Since GoLisp powers our software it’s evolution is largely driven by our needs. This is a case in point.

I’ve updated the map special form to take any number of list arguments.

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