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UIOP the Utilities for Implementation- and OS- Portability
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UIOP is the portability layer of ASDF.
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It provides utilities that abstract over discrepancies between implementations,
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between operating systems, and between what the standard provides and
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what programmers actually need, to write portable Common Lisp programs.
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It is organized by topic in many files, each of which defines its own package
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according to its topic: e.g pathname.lisp will define package UIOP/PATHNAME
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and contain utilities related to the handling of pathname objects.
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All exported symbols are reexported in a convenience package UIOP.
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The files that constitute UIOP are, in loading order:
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* package: to deal with packages and their symbols, most notably including
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DEFINE-PACKAGE, a variant of defpackage capable of hot-upgrade.
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* common-lisp: to let you paper over various sub-standard implementations.
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Big offenders are Corman, GCL, Genera, MCL, all of them unmaintained.
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Supported without serious issues are:
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ABCL, Allegro, CCL, CMUCL, CLISP, ECL, LispWorks, MKCL, SBCL, XCL.
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* utility: to provide macros and functions that do not involve I/O, handling
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control-flow, (p)lists, characters, strings, functions, classes, conditions,
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"stamps" (real number or boolean for +/- infinity), versions, etc.
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It also sports uiop-debug, a useful tool to help you debug programs.
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* os: to extract information from your environment, including
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an API identifier, unix vs windows, getenv, hostname, getcwd and chdir, etc.
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* pathname: to survive the gruesome non-portability trap that are CL pathnames
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(and their lovecraftian "logical" variant), offering a vast array of functions
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and a sensible, usable abstraction to specify relative pathnames.
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* filesystem: to provide portable access to the filesystem, inspecting it,
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only using truename when desired, using native OS namestrings,
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atomic file renaming, creating or deleting directories, etc.
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* stream: to portably deal with character encodings (external formats),
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element types, safe READing and WRITEing, opening files or temporary files,
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providing FORMAT-like designators for streams, flushing output buffers,
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consuming or copying streams, concatenating files, copying files, etc.
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* image: to portably deal with images, dumping them, restoring from them,
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registering hooks to run at suitable events in the image lifetime,
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printing backtraces, handling fatal conditions, using or avoiding debug modes,
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accessing command line arguments or quitting the process.
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* run-program: to portably spawn external processes and capture their output.
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Can also capture error-output, inject input, or let it all be interactive.
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* lisp-build: to portably compile common-lisp code, handle compilation results,
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muffle uninteresting conditions, save and restore deferred warnings,
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run hooks around compilation (to e.g. control optimizations or syntax),
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identify the pathname of the current file, combine FASLs, etc.
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* configuration: to write portable configuration files, using best practices
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to define and validate syntax, search standard paths,
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let users specify pathnames or pathname patterns, etc.
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* backward-driver: to provide backward-compatibility with earlier incarnations
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of this library (i.e. ASDF internals that have leaked, or ASDF-UTILS)
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* driver: to reexport all the above utilities in a single package UIOP.
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Each file starts with a package definition form that lists the exported symbols.
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All the exported functions, macros and variables ought to have proper docstrings.
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If not, then it's a legitimate bug that we invite you to report.
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Maybe some automated tool will extract all that information and
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make a webpage from it, at which point it would be nice to insert a link here.
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Unhappily, at the time of this writing, quickdocs only extracts information
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from the first package::
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http://quickdocs.org/uiop/api
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UIOP is part of ASDF 3, and any modern Common Lisp implementation
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will have all of UIOP available when you (require "asdf").
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NB: (require :asdf) also works on all implementations but CLISP.
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If you need some functionality only available in a recent version of UIOP,
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but cannot or will not upgrade ASDF, UIOP is also distributed separately;
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see e.g. in Quicklisp. You may then have to load it like any other library::
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(asdf:load-system :uiop)
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If you want to use UIOP while preserving compatibility with ASDF 2,
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we recommend that in your ASDF system definition you may use the like of::
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:depends-on (#-asdf3 :uiop)
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UIOP, formerly known as ASDF-DRIVER (the package and system nicknames live on),
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evolved from ASDF 2's internal utilities and portability layer.
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It has since fully superseded functionality from the following libraries:
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ASDF-UTILS (UIOP carries on the ASDF 2 utilities that this exported),
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CL-FAD (UIOP's pathname and filesystem functions are much more portable),
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CL-LAUNCH (UIOP took its image and command-line argument handling from it),
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EXTERNAL-PROGRAM, TRIVIAL-SHELL and XCVB-DRIVER (UIOP's run-program is better),
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SLIME's swank-loader (UIOP has better compilation and API identification),
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TRIVIAL-BACKTRACE (UIOP/IMAGE has all of it and more), etc.
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UIOP also captures a large subset of the functionality from TRIVIAL-FEATURES,
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and a small subset of the functionality from ALEXANDRIA.
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uiop/README
