Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a free Common Lisp implementation that features a high-performance native compiler,

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

support and threading. The name "Steel Bank Common Lisp" is a reference to

Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp CMUCL is a free Common Lisp implementation, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University. CMUCL runs on most Unix-like platforms, including Linux and BSD; there is an experimental Windows port as well. Steel Bank Common Lisp is derived ...

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 American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans i ...

made his fortune in the steel industry and

Andrew Mellon Andrew William Mellon (; March 24, 1855 – August 26, 1937), sometimes A. W. Mellon, was an American banker, businessman, industrialist, philanthropist, art collector, and politician. From the wealthy Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylv ...

was a successful banker.

History

SBCL descends from

CMUCL CMUCL is a free Common Lisp implementation, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University. CMUCL runs on most Unix-like platforms, including Linux and BSD; there is an experimental Windows port as well. Steel Bank Common Lisp is derived ...

(created at Carnegie Mellon University), which is itself descended from

Spice Lisp Spice Lisp (Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment) is a programming language, a dialect of Lisp. Its implementation, originally written by Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Spice Lisp Group, targeted the microcode of the 16-bit w ...

, including early implementations for the Mach operating system on the

IBM RT PC The IBM RT PC (RISC Technology Personal Computer) is a family of workstation computers from IBM introduced in 1986. These were the first commercial computers from IBM that were based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. Th ...

, and the Three Rivers Computing Corporation

PERQ The PERQ, also referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ or ICL PERQ, was a pioneering workstation computer produced in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. In June 1979, the company took its very first order from the UK's Rutherford Appleton La ...

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. Etymology Tall boots may have a tab, loop or handle at the top known as a bootstrap, allowing one to use fingers ...

procedure: CMUCL requires an already compiled

executable binary In computing, 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 data file ...

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

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

-compliant Common Lisp implementation. SBCL became a

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

project in September 2000. The original rationale for the

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

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 implementations Common Lisp (programming language) software Free compilers and interpreters Public-domain software with source code Software forks

History

References

Works cited

Further reading

External links