Web ECL Grant Announcement
Tagged as grant
Written by Daniel Kochmański on 2025-07-29 13:30
Dear Community,
I'm happy to share that I've received a grant from NLnet to work on improving the WebAssembly integration and ECL.
The project has four milestones that are expected to be finished within a year:
- Implement a protocol for interoperation with the web environment (DOM)
- Integrate a set of tools to develop Common Lisp code directly in a browser
- Port ECL to the Web Assembly System Interface (WASI)
- Implement a virtual filesystem extension for ECL
As you might have noticed, the first two milestones focus on using ECL in the browser setting. Progress of this part of the project may be tracked in a separate repository. I've already begun work on this, and the repository will now see much more activity.
After the first milestone it should be possible (and hopefully convenient) to directly incorporate Common Lisp scripts on websites that allow controlling DOM elements and implementing the application logic. I plan to design the protocol after CLIM II to make it easier to port McCLIM to this platform in the future.
The second milestone is related to developing a set of reusable components like a listener, a debugger and a code editor, and integrate them into a sample development environment for Common Lisp.
The next two steps will be far more involved with ECL internals and will benefit all platforms. Porting to WASI will improve ECL's portability and reduce its dependency on libc. I also hope to include my recent work on green threads in this step. A virtual filesystem will enable us to store entire systems in memory and work on files even when the host lacks a filesystem.
Some goals may change during development, but this is a general outline of the direction. If you have some questions (or suggestions), please write to our mailing list, or contact me directly.
Best regards,
Daniel
Funding
This project is funded through NGI0 Commons Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.
