I've used it in a couple production deployments and it's solid. It's only ~300 lines of Rust code, so I'm confident it is simple and even if I had a problem, would be easy to understand.
There are 3 flavors of picolisp: the 32-bit version written in gcc-specific C, the "Ersatz" version written in Java, and the 64-bit version written in its own high-level assembly-language that can target x86-64, PPC, ARM64 and "emulation" in C.
The Ersatz version has good Java integration. The 64-bit version has some more recent Java integration:
The *Lisp in the book The Connection Machine used a different sytax, there the operators α, β, and · where used to algebraically map and reduce lisp functions over parallel data structures as described in this paper by Hillis and Steele:
You're right, he talks in the video I linked above about how different the CM-1/2 architecture is to the CM-5, but how the ideas of "data parallelism" on "virtual processors" maps onto both designs.
Thanks for the info, I have seen variants in old pdfs around that have the !! parallelism construct instead of using the algebraic forms of alpha, beta, and dot. I find the latter form as described in the book The Connection Machine to be very elegant.
Note how similar the programming concepts are to CUDA (at an abstract level). Hillis also in the 80s published his MIT thesis as a book: The Connection Machine
An incredibly well written and fascinating read, just as relevant today for programming a GPU as it was for programming the ancient beast of a CM-2. It's about algorithms, graphs, map/reduce, and other techniques of parallelism pioneered at Thinking Machines.
For example, Guy Blelloch worked at TM, and pioneered prefix scans on these machines, now common techniques used on GPUs.
There's also been a lot of hum lately on HN about APL, much of Hillis' *Lisp ideas come from parallelizing array processing primitives ("zectors" and "zappings"), ideas that originating in APL as he acknowledged in the paper describing the language:
pgsodium is a postgres extension that adds libsodium integration to postgres, it exposes many of functions for patterns mentioned in the article, including box/secretbox, hashing, password handling, asymmetric keys, diffie-hellman, etc.
boomers? The baby boom generation was born between the mid-1940s and 1960s. They're all in their late 60s and 70s now and most have long retired. The age-out demography we are talking about now generally are their children currently in their early-40s to early 50s. The dial-up generation.
https://mermaidjs.github.io/