When comparing CMUCL vs Armed Bear Common Lisp, the Slant community recommends CMUCL for most people. In the question“What are the best Lisp dialects?” CMUCL is ranked 13th while Armed Bear Common Lisp is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose CMUCL is:
CMUCL runs about as fast as SBCL, and they are both among the fastest Common Lisp implementations. CMUCL compiles faster than SBCL, cutting down on development, deployment, installation, and user testing turnaround time.
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Pros
Pro Fast execution, faster compilation
CMUCL runs about as fast as SBCL, and they are both among the fastest Common Lisp implementations. CMUCL compiles faster than SBCL, cutting down on development, deployment, installation, and user testing turnaround time.
Pro Stand-alone executables
Pro Copyfree licensed (revised BSD license)
Most of CMUCL is in the public domain, with a few subsytems under permissive license.
Pro Can be integrated into java programs for scripting capabilities
Pro Fairly simple to learn and use
Written and interoperable with Java.
Cons
Con No Windows version
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.