Common Lisp implementation

Free Common Lisp implementations and their *features*.

Comparison of actively developed Common Lisp implementations

All the implementations below provide an FFI and sockets interface. Callbacks mean in this context that the FFI is capable of passing lisp-functions as callbacks to foreign functions. The startup file is loaded when the Lisp starts. Not all platforms listed may be actively supported.

Note: Some implementation builds fail to include FFI, sockets, and/or threads. Fink CLISP fails to includes threads, and MacPorts anything fails to include FFI. Aptitude lisps are severely out of date: SBCL fails on Xen, and ECL crashes during installation.

Implementation	Supported Platforms	Compiler	Threads?	Features	Startup file
CLISP	Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly BSD	Bytecode	Yes (experimental)	Small image size, very efficient bignums, Callbacks, modules	~/.clisprc.lisp
CMUCL	Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, IRIX, HPUX	Bytecode, Native & Block Compilation	No	High quality native compiler, foreign callbacks	~/.cmucl-init.lisp
ECL	Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X	Native via C, also bytecode	Yes (all platforms)	Executable delivery and portability. Integrates well with C programs (i.e. Embeddable, native powerful FFI).	~/.eclrc
CCL	Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows XP and later	Native	Yes (all platforms)	Small image size, fast compiler, convenient and powerful FFI, callbacks, executable delivery, precise gc	~/ccl-init.lisp
SBCL	Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows (Experimental)	Native	Yes (x86 and x86-64 Linux only; experimental on OS X, FreeBSD, Windows)	High quality native compiler; callbacks; executable delivery;	~/.sbclrc
ABCL	JVM	JVM bytecode	Yes	FFI to Java, platform independence	~/.abclrc
MKCL	Linux (x86 and x86_64), Windows XP (Win32), Windows 7 (Win64)	Native via C, bytecode-compiled interpreter	Yes	POSIX compliant runtime on Linux, Embeddable, FFI with callbacks.	~/.mkclrc

Daniel Weinreb has a current (as of February 2010) survey of Common Lisp implementations that is more detailed than the chart above.

All Free Software Common Lisp implementations (some of these may not be actively developed):

ABCL - Armed Bear Common Lisp (aka ABCL) is a Common Lisp implementation that runs on a Java Virtual Machine; a recent release is dated 2011-03-10
CCL - CCL is the Clozure Common Lisp implementation, its most recent release is available since 2010-10-06
CLiCC - CLiCC is a Common Lisp to C Compiler, last released 1995
clisp - CLISP is a Common Lisp implementation by Bruno Haible of Karlsruhe University and Michael Stoll of Munich University, both in Germany; the most recent release is dated 2010-07-07
CMUCL - CMUCL is a high-performance, free (mostly Public Domain) Common Lisp implementation that aims towards ANSI compatibility and runs on a number of Unix platforms - including Linux/ix86, Linux/Alpha,
ECL - Embeddable Common Lisp, a member of the KCL Family, is a Common Lisp implementation initially developed by Giuseppe Attardi and currently maintained by
emacs-cl - emacs-cl, Emacs Common Lisp is a Common Lisp implementation written in Emacs Lisp
GCL - GNU Common Lisp (GCL) is a Common Lisp implementation of the KCL Family that uses gcc to compile Lisp into native binaries
MCL - MCL is Macintosh Common Lisp, a venerable commercial Common Lisp implementation, still actively developed for MacOS X by Digitool
MKCL - ManKai Common Lisp
Movitz - Movitz is a Common Lisp implementation that targets the x86 PC architecture "on-the-metal"
Poplog - Poplog is a multi-language programming system which includes its own Common Lisp implementation, as well as Standard ML, Prolog, and Pop-11
Sacla - A partial (as of 2004) Common Lisp implementation written in Common Lisp by Yuji Minejima, under a BSD style license
SBCL - Steel Bank Common Lisp is an open source / free software Common Lisp implementation
ThinLisp - ThinLisp is a Common Lisp implementation that translates a subset of Common Lisp to very efficient C code
WCL - WCL is a Common Lisp implementation that provides Common Lisp as a Unix shared library that can be linked with Lisp and C code to produce efficient applications
XCL - XCL is a Common lisp implementation licensed under GPL

For non-free implementations, see the list on wikipedia.

If performance is an important criterion for you, you might be interested in the Performance Benchmarks page.

Pages in this topic: ABCL CCL CLiCC clisp CMUCL ECL emacs-cl GCL MCL MKCL Movitz Poplog Sacla SBCL ThinLisp WCL XCL

Also linked from: ACL ACL-COMPAT araneida Benchmarks Changes in June 2000 cl-jointgen Clozure Datoura detachtty Garnet Getting Started index Installing OpenMCL on Mac OS X Linux LISP Lisp newbie LispWorks LLVM MacOS X Marko Kocic NaCL NetBSD Performance Benchmarks Performance Benchmarks2 Planet of the Feebs Suggested Programming Projects X-Chat Common Lisp Plugin

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