Steel Bank Common Lisp

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SBCL

Author:	Forked from CMUCL
Developer:	Various
Initial release:	December 1999 (fork)
Latest release:	1.0 / November 2006
OS:	POSIX-compliant OSs; Microsoft Windows
Platform:	x86
Available language(s):	Common Lisp
Use:	Compiler
License:	GPL
Website:	www.sbcl.org

Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is an Free implementation of Common Lisp. It began as a fork from Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp and shares much code with that implementation. The rationale for the fork was to clean up the codebase in the interest of portability (whereas the mainstream CMUCL development aims instead to enhance the performance of the existing codebase, without undertaking such a major clean-up). It is eventually hoped that the project will result in a fully-standard Common Lisp implementation with the high performance characteristic of CMUCL, but which can be ported easily between platforms.

The name "Steel Bank Common Lisp" is a pun on the name of its parent project. Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry and Andrew Mellon had been a successful banker.

SBCL currently undergoes more active development and more frequent release than CMUCL. One of its major departures from CMUCL is that SBCL does not include an interpreter; all code is compiled, even that which is typed in interactively.