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cl-dataflow

cl-dataflow is a Common Lisp library for composable computation graphs: pipelines, event-driven workflows, guarded state machines, effect boundaries, lazy streams, and their push-based reactive dual. It targets SBCL, keeps its entire public surface behind a single package, and takes exactly one runtime dependency — cl-prolog, which backs the graph edge relation. Where a general-purpose graph library gives you data structures, cl-dataflow gives you a runtime: graphs that execute, carry a context, record a trace, and hand control to a state machine.

(asdf:load-system "cl-dataflow")

(cl-dataflow:run-pipeline *pipeline* :input 10)
;; => 22

Where to go next

New here? Getting Started → Core Concepts. Those three pages get you from an empty REPL to a running pipeline, plus the vocabulary the rest of the site assumes.

Building graphs. Graphs covers construction, validation, mutation, and export; Graph Algorithms and Graph Analysis cover the thirty or so analyses on top — connectivity, centrality, criticality, flow, and weighted shortest paths.

Running work through them. Pipelines and Workflows for sequential, branching, and fixpoint execution; State Machines for guarded transitions; Events and Effects for the boundaries that let one workflow drive another.

Processing sequences. Streams (Pull) is a lazy transducer layer, Reactive Subjects (Push) is its producer-driven dual, and Combinators and Resilience adds retry, fallback, memoization, and contracts around handlers. Observability and Serialization covers rendering and round-tripping what ran.

Looking something up. Public API Reference lists every exported symbol. Architecture explains how the runtime is split and carries the feature-by-feature status table. Development has the build, test, and coverage commands.

Design non-goals

cl-dataflow is intentionally not:

  • a CLI framework
  • parser combinators
  • terminal or TTY handling
  • a Prolog engine
  • an HTTP server
  • a database adapter
  • a distributed execution runtime
  • an async runtime
  • a large dependency injection framework
  • a generic utility package

Project

Contribution guidelines, the security policy, and the code of conduct are org-wide and live in nerima-lisp/.github.

MIT licensed — see LICENSE.