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Show HN: A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF

by andreamonaco on 4/27/25, 12:24 PM with 60 comments

Implementation of the standard is still not complete, but breakpoints and stepping work quite well! It also has some support for watchpoints, that no implementation has.

Now it ships with ASDF and is capable of loading systems!

Let me know if you like it. Support on Patreon or Liberapay is much appreciated

  • by danilor on 4/27/25, 4:55 PM

    Hey I'm curious as why you chose nongnu to host your project instead of github/gitlab! I don't know much about it, hence my curiosity ;)

  • by whartung on 4/27/25, 7:41 PM

    At what point does a CL implementation need to be before it can start hoovering up the available library code from other implementations (license permitting).

    How many LOOP macros does the community need, particularly when bootstrapping an implementation, as an example.

    Similarly with, arguably 70-80% of the runtime. The CL spec is dominated by the large library which, ideally, should be mostly portable CL, at least I would think.

  • by WalterGR on 4/27/25, 12:30 PM

    > a debugger with stepping, a feature that most free CL implementations lack.

    I think most free CL implementations have a stepper. Which ones do not?

  • by eadmund on 4/27/25, 3:38 PM

    Congratulations! Always good to see another Lisp in the world.

    Have you thought about writing up your experience?

  • by nexo-v1 on 4/29/25, 9:42 AM

    Out of curiosity, what influenced your decision to prioritize stepping and watchpoints early? Was it driven more by debugging your own compiler code, or anticipating end-user needs

  • by badmonster on 4/27/25, 5:32 PM

    Does alisp plan to eventually support full compilation to native code, or will it mainly stay an interpreter with limited compilation?

  • by neonscribe on 4/27/25, 4:11 PM

    Do you have a goal in mind for this project?

  • by CleverLikeAnOx on 4/27/25, 10:34 PM

    What is ASDF?

  • by valorzard on 4/27/25, 5:52 PM

    I would be excited to use but since it’s using GPLv3 I can’t actually use it for a lot of projects I’d want to make ;-; Is it possible to relicense to LGPL or MPL instead?