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”.

  • aartakaBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Kev-wqaBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      specifically, what is the diff between SBCL repl experience and CCL?

    • arthurno1BEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      CLISP is abandonware, even though the riches of the golden age when it was researched and worked on are still there

      I don’t know how much they consider it complete and how much they just don’t work on it, but there are some updates from time to time; I see the creator Bruno is pushing fixes from time to time.

      I tried GCL, but let’s not talk about that.

      :-) I would be interested to hear the experience. I am aware of it, but I haven’t had time to try it myself. They also seem to be on very sporadic development.

      I personally haven’t tried Clasp, CMUCL, CLisp and GCL yet; I just don’t have time. It takes time to try everything properly, build it etc, so I am currently just using sbcl; but I would be interested to know how other implementations compare in terms of completeness, extras they offer, performance, correctness etc. I would even watch a YT video if some YouTuber was interested in making a review wink wink you know who you are :).