When comparing GNU Emacs Lisp 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 GNU Emacs Lisp is ranked 10th. 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 If you use Emacs, it's a good language for what it does (better than VimL)
Pro Has lots of uses in Emacs
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.