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Comment by Klwohu | Hacker News Reader

SBCL's great. So is CLISP. GNU has the best Lisp going in 2021.

Not when comparing with Allegro or LispWorks, the only surviving ones of a Lisp Machine like experience, including GUI development and workflows.

While the devtool ecosystem around Allegro and LispWorks is better, SBCL as a compiler is a fair bit more performant. While it doesn't have quite the quick compilation times of Clozure, it's got everything else. I would go so far as to say it's the de facto CL implementation these days for noncommercial applications.

It helps that it doesn't come with a price tag, which is more relevant than how it performs or whatever tooling it is missing.

I see this sentiment asserted frequently but never with comparative data or examples. I have been using Common Lisp and other lisps for over three decades and never used these two, and have no obvious way to decide if or why I ever would. The free personal editions have so many caveats in their documentation I have had no interest in trying them first hand. SBCL has suited me well enough for quite some time, especially when combined with Emacs.

How is clisp better? Isn’t SBCL the most advanced lisp compiler, not just Common Lisp.

I thought clisp was maintained just to keep building Maxima

clisp has fewer features and is more stable, making it useful for certain applications

Would you mind expanding on that? What are the "fewer features" that make it more useful than SBCL?

I find SBCL to be highly stable. I haven't used Clisp for many years and I don't think there's been a new release for many years.

Clisp hasn't had a formal release in a long while, but activity on the repo is ongoing.

For a while GCL was the lisp that Maxima was built with. I think it's been SBCL for a while now.

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