When comparing Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) vs CLISP, the Slant community recommends Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) for most people. In the question“What are the best common lisp implementations?” Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is ranked 1st while CLISP is ranked 3rd. 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 Cross platform byte code
The CLISP bytecode is the same across platforms.
Cons
Con Confusing error messages
Con Produces large binaries
Con Slowed maintenance
Maintenance of CLISP has slowed to a crawl over the past few years. There's some signs this will be picking up again, but this may take a while.
Con Strong Copyleft
The runtime is under GPL.
