Steel Bank Common Lisp

Steel Bank Common Lisp ( SBCL ) is a fork of the free Common Lisp implementation CMUCL. It is part of the public domain, but some parts are under BSD-like licenses.

A development environment commonly used with SBCL is SLIME.

History

In December 1999, Bill Newmann SBCL began to develop as a fork from CMUCL. Background was the goal to simplify the bootstrapping process: CMUCL required to create an existing CMUCL, SBCL while can also be compiled from other Common Lisp implementations. Since then SBCL has been further developed and extended, inter alia, real threads on Linux/x86, Solaris/x86 and Mac OS X/x86, as opposed to the user threads in CMUCL.

In November 2006, Version 1.0 was released by SBCL; In early October 2012, reached version 1.1. Periodically, new versions are released.

The name of Steel Bank Common Lisp is an allusion to CMUCL. CMUCL is Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp, as it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University. The university was founded by Andrew Carnegie made ​​his fortune through steel (english Steel) had made, and Andrew Mellon, who had made ​​his fortune in banking (English bank). Therefore, the Fork was named after the two industries with which the founder of the university had made ​​their fortunes.

About 10 % of the SBCL source code is C and assembly code, the rest is even written in Common Lisp.

Platforms

SBCL runs under Linux on the x86 architectures, PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, and MIPS, as well as on Mac OS X / PowerPC, Mac OS X/x86, Solaris/x86, Solaris / SPARC, and FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD on x86. Currently SBCL is ported to Win32/x86 and IRIX / MIPS for Linux / HPPA and OSF / 1 on Alpha exist outdated ports.