SBCL 1.1.3

The fine folks at SBCL.org have released version 1.1.3 of their Common Lisp system. One of the contributed packages (SB-SPROF) failed a test on my MacBook Pro but worked fine on my iMac. It looks like a VM problem when it ran short of memory, which would make sense since the iMac has twice as much memory as the MacBook.

In any event, it seems to be working fine on both systems. If you’re running Linux on an AMD64 or 64 bit X86 they have a pre-built binary for you to download. Otherwise, you’ll have to build it yourself. That couldn’t be easier. Assuming you have an earlier SBCL compiler it’s just

tar -xvjf sbcl-1.1.3-source.tar.bz2
cd sbcl-1.1.3
sh make.sh
sudo sh install.sh

If you have some other Lisp compiler, the build process is essentially the same but with a different build script (see the SBCL Getting Started page).

If you’re looking to get started with Lisp, the SBCL package is an excellent choice. I’ve used SBCL on OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD and have always been happy with it.

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