When comparing Common Lisp vs Armed Bear Common Lisp, the Slant community recommends Common Lisp for most people. In the question“What are the best Lisp dialects?” Common Lisp is ranked 3rd while Armed Bear Common Lisp is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Common Lisp is:
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Carefully designed for interactive use
Almost all aspects of the language are designed with interactive/repl use in mind.
Pro Very Powerful REPL with SLIME
SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs).
Pro Condition/restart system
It is easy to recover from errors. Error resolution can be determined by the user at the REPL.
Pro Image based runtime
The state of the program may be saved and reloaded as an image, supporting safer modification of the running program. New code may be compiled into the image as the program runs, while late binding ensures that symbol redefinitions take effect throughout the program.
Pro Almost as fast as, or faster than, C
Some compilers such as SBCL can be faster than C or other low-level languages, and most compilers can generate fast native code.
Pro Can be integrated into java programs for scripting capabilities
Pro Fairly simple to learn and use
Written and interoperable with Java.
Cons
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.
