I recently embarked on a project to rebuild the main functionality of Turtl in common lisp. This requires embedding lisp (using ECL) into node-webkit (or soon, Firefox, as node-webkit is probably getting dumped).

To allow lisp and javascript to communicate, I made a simple messaging layer in C that both sides could easily hook into. While this worked, I stumbled on nanomsg and figured it couldn't hurt to give it a shot.

So I wrote up some quick bindings for nanomsg in lisp and wired everything up. So far, it works really well. I can't tell if it's faster than my previous messaging layer, but one really nice thing about it is that it uses file descriptors which can be easily monitored by an event loop (such as cl-async), making polling and strange thread < --> thread event loop locking schemes a thing of the past (although cl-async handles all this fairly well).

This simplified a lot of the Turtl code, and although right now it's only using the nanomsg "pair" layout type, it could be easily expanded in the future to allows different pieces of the app to communicate. In other words, it's a lot more future-proof than the old messaging system and probably a lot more resilient (dedicated messaging library authored by 0MQ mastermind beats hand-rolled, hard-coded simple messaging built by non-C expert).