One of the cool things about CMUCL is how its code is almost entirely in the public domain, and the parts that aren't tend to be a simple 2-clause BSD license. That's how you know the contributors do it out of love for the language and implementation :)
The same is true for SBCL[1], unsurprisingly since it came out of CMUCL.
The implementation was originally a university project (financially supported by DARPA) with a team funded to work on that implementation. Scott Fahlman was the lead and it was important for him that the implementation, its documents and its IDE was publicly available.
This is really great to see. Like most people I've moved to SBCL, but it's great to see the parent project still evolving.
Does it have anything to do with Carnegie Mellon University?
Yeah:
> CMUCL is a free Common Lisp implementation, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University
That's also the explanation for the name of its descendant: Steel Bank Common Lisp.
(Carnegie => Steel, Mellon => Bank.)
Any support for Apple Silicon, or plans to do so?
FYI, if you're just looking for a Common Lisp implementation for Apple Silicon, there is SBCL (which is a fork of CMU Common Lisp): https://www.sbcl.org/
highly unlikely, at this point cmucl support is a one man project by Raymond Toy. in order for the apple silicon to be supported two things need to happen, cmucl needs to be extended to support 64-bit and it needs to be ported to arm, both are major undertakings
> one man project by Raymond Toy
Literally a Toy implementation!
well, it's funny because cmucl is a very sophisticated compiler. even a decade ago, back when things like Haskell or ocaml were considered to be "fringe" languages, beating cmucl was an achievement. with type annotations and knowing what you're doing, you can make it perform in the ballpark of C
The same applies to SBCL (a fork of CMUCL) which has more active development now. The funny thing is that the name of the compiler is Python. But this Python actually produces fast programs :) .
Mark Z would have a leg up on A.I. had he not designed and developed on php