Here’s the Deal

MIT/GNU vs Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL)

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When comparing MIT/GNU vs Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL), 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 MIT/GNU is ranked 7th. 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

Common Questions

What are the best Lisp dialects?

Pros

No pros yet!

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.

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Cons

Con
Not made to run as standalone

Cannot be compiled to a standalone executable, only to byte code that can be run from the interpreter; and cannot be conveniently interpreted by the interpreter from the command line.

Con
Not very well-documented

The documentation is very sparse.

Con
Poor Windows support

Con
Ill-designed interpreter's interface

The interpreter does not support the use of the left and right arrows to move the cursor in the code and the use of the up and down arrows to navigate through the history.