When comparing Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) vs Armed Bear Common Lisp, the Slant community recommends Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) for most people. In the question“What are the best Lisp dialects?” Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is ranked 5th while Armed Bear Common Lisp is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is:
Has active contributors, including Google and some quantum computing companies engineers.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Heavily developped
Has active contributors, including Google and some quantum computing companies engineers.
Pro Type inference and type checking
Incorrect type declarations are treated as errors. SBCL can deduce types quite well.
Pro Actively maintained
Bug-fixes, performance improvements, refinements. New ports.
Pro Fast native code compiler
SBCL (and CMUCL)'s compiler, Python, produces optimized native code.
Pro Easy install
Portacle makes it easy to install SBCL, Emacs and SLIME.
Pro Free Open Source Software
Parts of SBCL are licensed under a BSD-Style license. The rest are in the public domain.
Pro Can be integrated into java programs for scripting capabilities
Pro Fairly simple to learn and use
Written and interoperable with Java.
Cons
Con Confusing error messages
Con Produces large binaries
Con The java API isn't always enough
Some of its features are made private and can't easily be modified from java.
Con Can be slow and clunky because of the java overhead
It is using java.
Java is slow.
Ergo: abcl is slow.