fp.

Can we get a "(1999)" date on this, please? Only half joking becuase I see Common Lisp and, sure, I upvote ... but honestly, what's the purpose of this HN submission without context?

SBCL is obviously fantastic but let's contrast with another popular implementation: Embeddable Common Lisp. https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/

Top marks for SBCL performance but ECL can be a better fit for embedding into mobile applications, running on lighter weight hardware, and in the browser.

tosh•45m ago

nb: there is a SBCL release at end of every month: https://www.sbcl.org/all-news.html

emptybits•19m ago

Thanks. Your link gives more insight into "why submit now?" Appreciate it.

jibal•46m ago

What about it?

oytis•32m ago

It's a recurrent event when someone on HN discovers some well-known piece of technology.

tmtvl•2m ago

It's awesome and the lucky 10,000 deserve to be introduced to it?

shadowgovt•40m ago

My favorite bit of SBCL trivia is the name: this is descended from Carnegie Mellon's build.

Steel. Bank.

wiz21c•33m ago

I don't get it :-(

wk_end•28m ago

I think it's just that Andrew Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, and the Mellons made their fortune in banking.

giraffe_lady•17m ago

That's very fun and makes so much more sense than my half guess that it was from a defunct regional mid 20th century bank I had never heard of.

philipkglass•9m ago

Older HN users may recall when busy discussions had comments split across several pages. This is because the Arc language that HN runs on was originally hosted on top of Racket [1]. In September 2024 Dang et al finished porting Arc to SBCL, and performance increased so much that even the largest discussions no longer need splitting. The server is unresponsive/restarting a lot less frequently since these changes, too, despite continued growth in traffic and comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41679215

[1] https://racket-lang.org/

pjmlp•3m ago

While great option, LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp should not be overlooked, too many focus on SBCL + Emacs and then complain about Lisp tooling.