Rainer Joswig
Hamburg, Germany
Email: joswig@lisp.de

Home > Lisp News > 22. September 2008

Clozure Common Lisp 1.2 released

Clozure Common Lisp 1.2 has been released.
Supported platforms are:
  • PowerPC: Mac OS X and Linux
  • 64bit x86: Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD
An port to 32bit x86 is in the works and will be part of the next release.

Clozure CL has a Cocoa bridge and the beginning of an IDE on Mac OS X machines (32bit PowerPC or 64bit x86). There hasn't been that much progress with the IDE lately and it is still relatively basic and a bit buggy.

You can try the IDE by starting Clozure CL from the Terminal on a Mac and evaluating (require :cocoa-appplication) . It will load the necessary files and dump an application in the Clozure CL directory. I had to change older preferences of Clozure CL to point to the right Clozure CL directory to make that work. Once the application is saved, it can be started from the Finder by opening it (double-click ...). I found some examples not to be working. Clearly the GUI side is not very polished yet. Alternatively Clozure CL can be used with Emacs and SLIME as the development environment.

The implementation of Common Lisp itself though should be pretty good. The garbage collector is very efficient, Clozure CL generates compact native code and the compiler is fast (faster than SBCL's compiler). The speed of the compiled code is just fine for many applications, though SBCL will often generate faster code.

Daniel Weinreb of ITA Software reports that they are using Clozure CL for the business logic of a new airline reservation system (!) for Air Canada. They now have written 500kloc of Common Lisp code and are using additionally 100kloc lines of open source Common Lisp libraries for this application. Another large application from ITA Software uses SBCL.

Clozure CL is licensed under the LLGPL.

Links:
Clozure Common Lisp
Clozure Common Lisp 1.2 FTP directory
Clozure Common Lisp Documentation
Hemlock Command Implementor's Manual

Keywords:
CLOZURE-CL

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