this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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TL;DR: Use SBCL or CCL. Others—maybe, but likely in their own specific niches.
I want to give more chances to implementations there are, so here's my experience, in the order of preference:
I haven't tried Clasp, Corman, CMUCL, and LispWorks. So no review for them. I tried GCL, but let's not talk about that.
It is "SBCL or proprietary" nowadays. LW and ACL are fine but are pricy and well, proprietary.
CCL is all but dead.
ECL has a kind of limited niche, and is not as advanced as SBCL(e.g.: MOP). Same goes for ABCL. Also, ABCL is kind of slow.
Clasp is somewhat interesting, but it also has a limited niche (C++ interop) and is also not as advanced as SBCL.
GNU implementations are dead(GCL, CLISP)
Everything else is as dead as GNU implementations.
Can I ask what you mean by CLISP being dead? The last stable release was 10y ago yes, but development continues to this day and beta releases are available. Nixpkgs actually ships a beta version by default now.
I maintain a Nix scope with hundreds of Common Lisp packages and I am actually about to merge a dev branch that introduces CLISP support for all packages & their tests; it holds its own pretty well: https://github.com/hraban/cl-nix-lite/tree/clisp. see the list of all packages in the lisp-packages-lite.nix file).
CLISP development: https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp
Well, I was judging by its official page and Sourceforge activity, which seems negligible. However, Gitlab also does not seem very active (6 commits this year, despite lots of open bugs). The development is almost stalled. It is on life support, at best.
Yeah, that sums it well enough. I pin my hopes on ECL and Clasp because of portability and active development.