this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Personaly i found abcl a bad experience.
Thoughts on ecl & clisp ?

sbcl works nice & fine. But i't's the only lisp implementation i know.
There are good books on racket-scheme & chez-cheme.
The only book i know for lisp is, "Common lisp , a gentle introduction to symbolic computing".

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[–] aartaka@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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:

  • SBCL is good. De-facto standard. The REPL experience is... not the best, but practical. Debugger loop is snappy, though.
  • CCL (Clozure Common Lisp) is extremely good for development: it is attentive to style, it has exhaustive type checks, it has a nice REPL (probably the best of open-source implementations, on par with Allegro) and a debugger with actually useful stack traces.
  • ECL is embeddable, and that's its biggest value proposition: you can run it anywhere C runs and you can interact with C-based software easily. Beyond this platform-friendliness, ECL has reasonable code optimization abilities and a practical REPL.
  • ABCL is useful if you interface with JVM. So if you need to work with Java in Lisp, it's either Clojure or ABCL. Implementation and REPL experience is somewhat simplistic, but let's give it a chance.
  • CLISP is abandonware, even though the riches of the golden age when it was researched and worked on are still there.
  • Allegro is proprietary, which sucks. Given that it's proprietary, it doesn't have as much contributors as, for instance, SBCL. So it actually is worse than open-source impls. But it has a nice inspirational REPL. If you don't need a commercial support license for a huge company, then you likely don't need Allegro.

I haven't tried Clasp, Corman, CMUCL, and LispWorks. So no review for them. I tried GCL, but let's not talk about that.

[–] love5an@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] downtown-quasi-moody@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] love5an@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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