Ask HN: What's the state of Common LISPs on ARM64-Linux? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the state of Common LISPs on ARM64-Linux?

Was trying to compile and run something on Gentoo that required virtual/commonlisp. None of the provider packages I unmasked worked. sbcl installed but crashed at runtime with an mmap failed message about ASLR. PS: I might either find a distro that has patched to add ASLR to sbcl to replicate the patching process or bite my tongue and disable PIE/PIC on this ebuild.

View on HN

I use the commercial LispWorks on ARM64-Linux.

Nice. I too wish I had infinite money to throw at otherwise creaky solutions for texlive installations. ;) I found out that one of gentoo's docbook packages in base (stage3) currently contains a high-rated CVE from an old bundled .jar file. It's not the end of the world™ because it's not a RCE, but it's kind of bad™ having old, vulnerable stuff included.

sbcl is supposed to work, might be worth asking for help on their IRC. ECL isn't keyworded, but it might work, Debian packages it for arm64.

Might be related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bug/1523213 (so unrelated to arm64) ?

Ah, thanks. I'll have to try it out. Gentoo lets me just drop patches into /etc/portage/dev-lisp/sbcl/ and run emerge on it again. And I'll probably run the test suites on these packages to be sure they're actually working rather than just built.

I suppose you can't disable ASLR? Since this seem to be the true incompatibility with SBCL. In any way, I'd try extra harder to make SBCL work, as it is the main CL impl these days.

I might be able to using compiler options. SBCL seems like the best and fastest option, but GNU clisp seems like it should be doable as an alternative albeit slower.

clisp is packaged for Ubuntu LTS, I haven't complied anything with it and your make file might need to be checked for compatibility, but it could be an option

Ubuntu is a nonstarter. Because there are many "clisp"s, what's the precise name of the package? This determines which codebase was used, i.e., GNU clisp. And, are you certain it works on arm64? (GNU clisp should by virtue of being a slower VM byte interpreter)

I spent time in gentoo myself, and know what you mean about packages, but the package name in Apt is ‘clisp’ and I double checked by pulling and firing up the repl in Ubuntu 24.04 on a Pi4.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com