u/denzuko

I recently became an empty-nester and decided it was time to get back on the trails. I took a picture of my bike, uploaded it to Gemini and asked it to give me some good options for getting back in the saddle (I've tried the Ascent, I like it but we're only 20 miles in). It's first comment was to encourage my efforts to get back on my vintage mountain bike... I'll try and share some current trail footage on my antiquated bi-cycle.

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DATELINE: THE PENTABARF

In a sudden, shocking turn of events that has left theologians and backyard grill-masters completely disoriented, an unprecedented hot dog structural anomaly has been reported across the r/discordian sector.

Citizens are currently being urged to look down at their paper plates and answer the ultimate, harrowing question: "Do you know where your buns are?"

Summary

Over the past few weeks I've ran into a need to extend the BKNR Lisp Application Environment for several internal infrastructure projects AI development improvments at dapla.net.

Because FOSS is amazing and I'm sure others in the community would have a need for these tools. I have released three new Common Lisp libraries focused on simplifying single-process persistence and native testing workflows:

• bknr.hashkv – Extends bknr.datastore to provide a content-addressable key-value store and a disk-persisted job queue within a single Lisp image.

• bknr.ttl – A declarative TTL mixin class for bknr.datastore instances that automates stale record eviction and session expiry.

• sunny-side – A pure Common Lisp parser and runner for Gherkin .feature specifications, eliminating the need to invoke external Ruby binaries during test execution.

All three repositories are published under BSD 3-Clause licenses. The names for each library was deliberately chosen to pair well with established bknr libraries and for great respect to Hans Huebner, David Lichteblau, and Manuel Odendahl's original works.

My plans are to continue contributing to the bknr suite both upstream and the extensions I've built on top of it.

Links and feedback welcome:

• https://github.com/denzuko/bknr.hashkv
• https://github.com/denzuko/bknr.ttl
• https://github.com/denzuko/sunny-side

Background

Building robust applications in Common Lisp often hinges on leveraging native language capabilities rather than reaching for external, multi-process dependencies. When an application state fits comfortably within memory or local storage, introducing an external key-value database or a separate test-runner process introduces unnecessary operational friction. Three recently released open-source libraries extend the bknr.datastore ecosystem and introduce native Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) testing to Common Lisp without relying on external runtime environments.

Content-Addressable Storage and Persisted Queuing with bknr.hashkv

The bknr.hashkv library provides an in-memory, content-addressable key-value store alongside an append-only persisted job queue. Built directly on top of bknr.datastore, it allows system architects to maintain deterministic object reference hashing while relying on disk-backed transaction logs for durability.

Key capabilities include:

Content-Addressable Semantics: Keys are generated deterministically based on payload hashes, preventing redundant entry storage and enforcing data integrity at the access layer.

Integrated Job Queueing: Asynchronous tasks are written to the persistent log alongside state mutations, ensuring that queued jobs survive process restarts without requiring an external Redis or RabbitMQ instance.

Single-Process Operations: Eliminates cross-process serialization overhead by maintaining native Lisp object availability across transactions.

Automatic Expiration via bknr.ttl

Managing ephemeral records in memory-resident databases requires disciplined eviction mechanisms to avoid memory leaks over extended uptimes. The bknr.ttl library introduces a Time-To-Live (TTL) mixin class designed for seamless integration with any bknr.datastore object model.

By attaching the TTL mixin to standard object definitions, slots gain automatic timestamp tracking and expiration handling. Background sweep routines or query-time inspections enforce key invalidation without polluting core business logic with manual timestamps. This approach offers a clean, declarative method for handling transient cache entries, timed session states, and self-cleaning audit logs within native Lisp datastores.

Native Gherkin Parsing with sunny-side

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) frameworks frequently force Common Lisp projects to rely on Ruby binaries or shell invocations to parse feature files written in Gherkin syntax. The sunny-side library replaces these external dependencies with a pure Common Lisp implementation of the Gherkin specification.

sunny-side parses standard .feature files, maps natural language step definitions directly to Lisp macros, and executes tests natively within the SBCL compiler pipeline. By removing foreign runtime dependencies, test suites run faster, integrate cleanly into continuous integration pipelines, and allow developers to debug step definitions directly using standard Lisp introspection and debugging tools.

How you know its a Friday...

I know this is low volt/ networking but had to share

Alongside ongoing work updating c-mera and modernizing Common Lisp tooling for SecDevOps and OT environments, I recently set out to evaluate whether a pure Lisp stack could replace our external infrastructure and database tooling (specifically Vagrant and Redgate).

The goal was to integrate Consfigurator (declarative OS deployment) with cl-migratum (database migrations).

To test this, I authored a Roswell script that provisions a rootless Podman quadlet running PostgREST and deploys a small HTMX todo app against PostgreSQL. The setup uses:

• SXQL for SQL schema generation
• Spinneret for HTML generation
• CL-inix for systemd unit file generation
• FiveAM for integration testing
• 40ants/doc for self-documenting executable scripts

In the sandbox environment, Roswell provisions a ZFS dataset, configures a dedicated system user, spins up PostgreSQL and PostgREST, and applies the database migrations directly from memory.

Running this end-to-end surfaced ten real bugs across the ecosystem (reproduction steps and full list are inFINDINGS.md).

A few notable issues worth calling out:

• In-memory DCL with cl-migratum: cl-migratum expects file-based DDL/DML out of the box and doesn't handle in-memory sxql expressions cleanly. I had to write a custom in-memory driver using its driver API and extend it to handle DCL (Data Control Language) statements.
• System naming gotcha: cl-migratum-driver-pg doesn't exist under that system name. When pulling via qlot, the actual system is cl-migratum.driver.postmodern-postgresql.
• Spinneret compile-time attribute quoting: Spinneret decides whether to quote HTML attribute values at macro expansion time based on literal string characteristics, not runtime values. A class="%s" placeholder compiles down fine, but breaks silently at runtime the second a substituted string contains spaces. Spinneret provides *always-quote* to handle this, but it requires a global SETF prior to compilation rather than a dynamic LET binding at runtime. I've opened a PR to document and address this:spinneret#114.
• Idempotency in PostgreSQL schema definitions: Neither CREATE ROLE nor CREATE DOMAIN support IF NOT EXISTS in Postgres. Because cluster-level roles and domains survive dropping and recreating a database, subsequent deployments failed immediately on schema re-application.
• Undocumented C library dependencies: Consfigurator depends on native headers (libacl1-dev, libcap-dev) that aren't noted in the build requirements. I sent a patch upstream via git send-email following their contribution guidelines.

Full code and reproduction notes:https://github.com/denzuko/todo-app-deploy

mlisp is a mailing list manager done as production-grade, compiled Common Lisp baseed replacement for smartlist and Mailman 2 in a procmail-based MTA environment. Every message processes through a single-binary delivery pipeline with no daemon required. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance are baked in.

Yes one can use this with a repl or typical procmailrc process. Current version also adds a procmail-dsl, gnu bugs replacement, milter plugins, neural.sh (openai shell pipe) intergration, subscriber commands, BITNET search, AllFix files, DKIM/RFC8058/DMARC, rate-limit, embargo, subgroups, and more.

https://github.com/denzuko/mlisp/releases/tag/v0.8.0

#foss #selfhosted #infrastructure #privacy