Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

implementation that features a high-performance native compiler,

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

support and threading. It is open source software, with a permissive license. In addition to the compiler and runtime system for ANSI Common Lisp, it provides an interactive environment including a debugger, a statistical profiler, a code coverage tool, and many other extensions. The name "Steel Bank Common Lisp" is a reference to Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp from which SBCL forked:

Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie ( , ; November 25, 1835August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the History of the iron and steel industry in the United States, American steel industry in the late ...

made his fortune in the steel industry and Andrew Mellon was a successful banker.

History

SBCL descends from CMUCL (created at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

), which is itself descended from Spice Lisp, including early implementations for the Mach operating system on the IBM RT PC, and the Three Rivers Computing Corporation PERQ computer, in the 1980s. William Newman originally announced SBCL as a variant of CMUCL in December 1999. The main point of divergence at the time was a clean

bootstrapping In general, bootstrapping usually refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to continue or grow without external input. Many analytical techniques are often called bootstrap methods in reference to their self-starting or self-supporting ...

procedure: CMUCL requires an already compiled

executable binary In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", as opposed to a da ...

of itself to compile the CMUCL source code, whereas SBCL supported bootstrapping from theoretically any

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-compliant Common Lisp implementation. SBCL became a

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project in September 2000. The original rationale for the fork was to continue the initial work done by Newman without destabilizing CMUCL which was at the time already a mature and much-used implementation. The forking was amicable, and there have since then been significant flows of code and other cross-pollination between the two projects. Since then SBCL has attracted several developers, been ported to multiple hardware architectures and operating systems, and undergone many changes and enhancements: while it has dropped support for several CMUCL extensions that it considers beyond the scope of the project (such as the Motif interface) it has also developed many new ones, including native threading and Unicode support. Version 1.0 was released in November 2006, and active development continues. William Newman stepped down as project administrator for SBCL in April 2008. Several other developers have taken over interim management of releases for the time being. For the tenth anniversary of SBCL, a Workshop was organized. Version 2.0.0 was released on 29 December 2019 for the 20th anniversary of SBCL, with no major breaking changes.

References

Works cited

External links

SBCL homepage

Planet SBCL - The Common Lisp Wiki
{{Common Lisp Common Lisp (programming language) software Common Lisp implementations Free and open source compilers Public-domain software with source code Software forks

History

References

Works cited

Further reading

External links