This article provides a comprehensive review of the Common Lisp ecosystem's progress throughout 2023 and 2024, highlighting its continued vitality and evolution. The author curates significant developments across various domains, starting with community growth and the enhancement of key documentation resources like the CL Cookbook. A major focus is on the advancements in Lisp implementations, most notably SBCL's new garbage collector and the revival of Clozure CL. The post underscores commercial relevance with recent job postings and a major success story: Hacker News now runs on an SBCL-based backend. Key advancements in the development ecosystem are detailed, including major updates to the Lem editor, the emergence of modern package managers, and progress in specialized fields like gamedev (with the release of Kandria), GUI development, and web technologies. The review serves as an optimistic summary, demonstrating a thriving landscape of new tools, libraries, and active projects that counter the perception of Lisp as a dormant language.
Common Lisp in 2023-2024: A Thriving Ecosystem in Review
Key Takeaway: The Common Lisp ecosystem is not just stable but actively evolving, with significant progress in tooling, libraries, implementations, and community engagement over the past two years.
Hacker News Runs on SBCL: In a major milestone, the Hacker News website now operates on Clarc, a new implementation of the Arc language built on top of the high-performance Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) compiler.
Community and Learning Resources:
The community shows growth with active forums, regular European Lisp Symposium conferences, and new meetups.
Documentation has improved, with updates to the collaborative CL Cookbook, Peter Norvig's classic "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" becoming available online, and new learning materials like a freeCodeCamp course on YouTube.
Implementation Advancements:
SBCL: Received continuous monthly releases, featuring a new, more efficient mark-region garbage collector, improved support for arm64, and the ability to cross-compile to Android.
Clozure CL (CCL): The previously dormant project has been revived with a new release, signaling renewed development.
ECL: The embeddable implementation now supports running software like the Maxima computer algebra system in a web browser via WebAssembly (WASM).
Other Implementations: Updates and releases were also noted for ABCL, CLASP, and the historical Medley Interlisp project.
Commercial Use and Jobs: The article highlights that Common Lisp continues to be a viable choice for commercial projects, citing public job postings from companies like Keepit, DXC Technology, and Triton Systems.
Editor and Development Tooling:
Lem Editor: Has seen major releases (2.0, 2.1, 2.2), adding a new graphical frontend (SDL2), broader implementation support, and powerful new features like an interactive git mode. A cloud-based pair programming environment based on Lem, named Rooms, is also under development.
Package Management: While Quicklisp received a long-awaited update, new and alternative package managers like ocicl have emerged, and existing tools like Qlot have been improved to offer more robust dependency management.
Coalton: The static type system for Common Lisp is being used in production (e.g., in the quantum industry) and is fostering its own ecosystem of tools and libraries.
Application Development Highlights:
Gamedev: The full commercial game Kandria, built with the Trial game engine, was released. The community remains active with regular Lisp Game Jams.
GUI: Progress was made on libraries like McCLIM and nodgui. Modern cross-platform GUI development is also being enabled through bindings for web technologies like Electron and WebUI.
Web Development: The CLOG framework continues to mature, now including a complete IDE and GUI builder. New libraries for JSON parsing (JZON) and web scraping (ScrapyCL) have been introduced.
Scripting: New projects like kiln aim to make scripting in Common Lisp more efficient and ergonomic.