LISP in the Windows Azure Cloud?

05 February 2009

So here I am in London learning about the Microsoft Windows Azure Services Platform

In an idle few moments, I thought it would be fun to try to run LSharp in the cloud – I expected that the partial trust model would probably prevent the reflection and code gen stuff from working, but to my surprise it seems to work well! Try it out at http://lsharp.cloudapp.net/

I’m just pushing the source code up to Subversion if you want to take a look ..

svn co https://lsharp.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lsharp/v2 lsharp

You can run it locally using the dev fabric (I’m using the January CTP build).

The rss.ls sample runs unmodified, as does fib.ls and factorial.ls (look in the samples directory)

One interesting thing is using LSharp to have a dig around in the Azure runtime

> (System.Environment.OSVersion)
Microsoft Windows NT 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2, v.223
> (System.Environment.ProcessorCount)
1
> (System.Environment.Version)
2.0.50727.3069

Special thanks to Simon Davies and Alistair Beagley who managed to get me an Azure account in record time.

I’ve no idea whether it will stay up for long, but have a play and let me know what you think …