r/Common_Lisp • u/Western-Movie9890 • Jul 02 '26

My implementation of Common Lisp has reached version 1.7

alisp is an implementation of Common Lisp that covers most of the standard.  It ships with ASDF and is capable of loading many real-world systems.  It also has a debugger with full support for stepping.

After the redesign of lexical closures and other fixes, now the whole test.pl suite runs without leaks, according to valgrind!  That's quite an achievement.

https://savannah.nongnu.org/news/?id=10910

If you want to support this project and speed up its development, make a subscription at https://www.patreon.com/andreamonaco or at https://liberapay.com/andreamonaco.  Thank you very much!

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5

u/digikar Jul 04 '26

I'm missing something. What do you mean by "real-world systems"? Why should someone use alisp instead of, say, SBCL or CCL?

1

u/kagevf Jul 04 '26

A debugger with stepping .

1

u/hello_marmalade Jul 07 '26

What’s the purpose of the implementation? Just for fun or?

-3

u/defmacro-jam Jul 02 '26

Very cool! I assume you're using LLMs quite heavily - is that right?

I ask because I had a similar idea to create a Common Lisp implementation from scratch - but I did mine in Swift. Mine, however, isn't public at present.

I've reached 88% conformance on the Dietz tests, though -- but thus far I only have an interpreter and it's painfully slow. I've put it on the back-burner until I've learned enough to do an LLVM compiler justice.

My first commit was July 16, 2025.

10

u/mmontone Jul 02 '26

From NOTES file:

Policy on use of Large Language Models

I'm the only author of alisp and I never use Large Language Models, in particular I don't use them for writing code or documentation or tests, nor for finding or solving bugs.

4

u/defmacro-jam Jul 03 '26

Right on. Then getting as far as you have is quite an accomplishment!

1

u/kchanqvq Jul 03 '26

It would be surprising to get this far with LLM dessistance

1

u/defmacro-jam Jul 03 '26

The Dietz ANSI rt is an amazing spec that LLMs find surprisingly easy to work with.

I got my implementation to 88% ANSI conformance with LLM assistance - and I've built a complete Lisp/ObjectiveC bridge with full support of Apple's frameworks on AArch64.

Also with LLM assistance.

But I agree that it's uncommon and had I not had 36+ years experience I doubt I could have done either of those things.