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

New: Free restricted noncommercial licenses of Scieneer Common Lisp

Douglas Crosher recently announced the availability of free restricted noncommercial licenses for Scieneer Common Lisp. The pricing model for the commercial licenses of Scieneer Common Lisp has also been changed. Scieneer Common Lisp is a commercial fork of CMU Common Lisp and is available for several Unix-like (Solaris, HPUX, Linux) operating systems in 64bit and 32bit versions. Douglas Crosher has extended CMUCL in several ways. Most prominent are the 64bit memory model and the support for concurrent computation on multiple CPU cores. With the new licensing model it is quite easy to evaluate Scieneer Common Lisp. All the necessary interaction with Scieneer Pty Ltd (the company) can be done via the website and via mail. One needs to apply for a license and retrieves the software and licenses. Douglas has also ported some (free) Lisp software to SCL. The license is restricted, but the restrictions are not technical. There is no smaller heap size and no limited runtime. The license is valid for a year. Scieneer Common Lisp implements the full Common Lisp standard with lots of extensions. But it does not include an IDE. The typical IDE would probably be based on GNU Emacs and SLIME. I have applied for a 64bit AMD version compatible with Debian Linux. I have this version installed under Ubuntu 64bit - running under VMWare Fusion 2.0 - which runs on my Apple MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo Intel processor. This way I can run Scieneer Common Lisp on my Mac, though it does not run under Mac OS X. Scieneer CL needs a hostname and the Ethernet address for the license. Installation was painless - mainly decompressing and untarring it. After saving the license file in the right directory, I was able to start Scieneer Common Lisp without a problem. joswig@rjubuntu:~/scl$ /opt/scl/bin/scl Scieneer Common Lisp 1.3.8.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2008, Scieneer Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Restricted noncommercial license. Licensed to Rainer Joswig. Loaded subsystems: Compiler 1.0, target AMD64 * *features* (:COMPILER :IEEE-FLOATING-POINT :ANSI-CL :COMMON-LISP :SCL :COMMON :UNIX :GLIBC2 :LINUX :AMD64 :64BIT :DIRECT-SYSCALL :LONG-FLOAT :IMMEDIATE-SINGLE-FLOAT :GENCGC :PROPAGATE-FUN-TYPE :PROPAGATE-FLOAT-TYPE :CONSTRAIN-FLOAT-TYPE :CONSERVATIVE-FLOAT-TYPE :RANDOM-MT19937 :RELATIVE-PACKAGE-NAMES :PTHREAD :MP :SMP) * So, I had to try SCL with CL-HTTP (the web server written by John Mallery and friends). Douglas Crosher had created a port of CL-HTTP earlier, but that one had some bit rod. With the help of Douglas I have updated the port and integrated the patches into CL-HTTP. A newer version of CL-HTTP will integrate these patches and will make the maintenance of the SCL port easier. I have configured the Lisp compiler to be less noisy about optimizations - that saves a lot of compilation time. Compiling and loading CL-HTTP is completely painless. One ASDF file needs to be loaded and then then the load operation does all. There is also no additional software to install besides ASDF (which I got via the Scieneer website). So, I got the web server running. Then I tried McCLIM, the McCLIM Listener, CLIMACS and Gsharp - the latter three being applications written on top of McCLIM. With only a few patches I was able to compile and run McCLIM and the applications. That's pretty good! User interface speed is also quite good. Scieneer CL (and CMUCL) does exists for quite some time and thus even a non-trivial piece of Common Lisp software like CL-HTTP or McCLIM, which use of a large part of the Common Lisp language, compiles without surprises. So I think it is quite welcome that it now is much easier to try out Scieneer Common Lisp - with the new restricted noncommercial license. Many thanks to Douglas Crosher!

Links:

Scieneer Common Lisp

Scieneer Common Lisp Webstore

Free restricted noncommercial licenses of Scieneer Common Lisp

Keywords:

SCIENEER-CL