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I use emacs regularly (in fact I have it running right now) and I think the complaints against it are perfectly valid. Emacs is awesome in lots of ways, but it

I use emacs regularly (in fact I have it running right now) and I think the complaints against it are perfectly valid. Emacs is awesome in lots of ways, but it also really, really sucks in lots of other ways. But putting emacs aside, the SBCL tooling seems reasonable to me. The real reason I rarely reach for lisp these days is not the tooling, but because the Common Lisp library ecosystem is a wasteland of partial implementations and abandoned code bases. It's also been my experience that LLMs are better at writing more mainstream languages, especially "newbie-proof" languages like Go. In any case, I don't see why one would reach for Allegro or Lispworks over SBCL unless one really enjoys writing lisp by hand and needs specific features they offer that SBCL doesn't. I would imagine those features are vanishingly few.

vindarel 7mo ago
I'd prefer that a LispWorks user answer, but there are quite a few interesting features, such as: - tree shaking and small binaries (±5MB a GUI app) - the CAPI cross-platform and native GUI toolkit - mobile platforme runtime (iOs, Android) - its Java interface - its KnowledgeWorks system for "rule-based, object-oriented, logical, functional and database programming" - more? ps: today we maintain a list of pretty decent libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/ https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/
- mveety 7mo ago
  I'm a lispworks user for a few projects. The killers, generally, for an enterprise project are the smaller binaries and java interface. I know of a few places that write gui apps in lispworks, but many (most?) projects with a user interface use some web framework stuff and only do the backend in lisp. The java is a killer feature for lisp adoption. A lot of companies use java heavily and being able to easily interface with that stuff is often a technical requirement and if not a technical one, a management requirement.
remexre 7mo ago
my impression is that most CL these days is existing large closed-source codebases, hence the price tag for those compilers (you're not trying it out for a bit, you're funding the compiler devs to work full-time on the issues you're actually having) and relatively little open-source activity for "finished" things -- if you're developing against internal libraries, it's hard to open-source just the part you intend to (work at a CL shop; mostly SBCL users, but maybe 1/3 of people are die-hard ACL fans)

vindarel 7mo ago

I'd prefer that a LispWorks user answer, but there are quite a few interesting features, such as: - tree shaking and small binaries (±5MB a GUI app) - the CAPI cross-platform and native GUI toolkit - mobile platforme runtime (iOs, Android) - its Java interface - its KnowledgeWorks system for "rule-based, object-oriented, logical, functional and database programming" - more? ps: today we maintain a list of pretty decent libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/ https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/

mveety 7mo ago
I'm a lispworks user for a few projects. The killers, generally, for an enterprise project are the smaller binaries and java interface. I know of a few places that write gui apps in lispworks, but many (most?) projects with a user interface use some web framework stuff and only do the backend in lisp. The java is a killer feature for lisp adoption. A lot of companies use java heavily and being able to easily interface with that stuff is often a technical requirement and if not a technical one, a management requirement.

remexre 7mo ago

my impression is that most CL these days is existing large closed-source codebases, hence the price tag for those compilers (you're not trying it out for a bit, you're funding the compiler devs to work full-time on the issues you're actually having) and relatively little open-source activity for "finished" things -- if you're developing against internal libraries, it's hard to open-source just the part you intend to (work at a CL shop; mostly SBCL users, but maybe 1/3 of people are die-hard ACL fans)