OpenMCL/CCL on Leopard
Sunday, January 6, 2008
OpenMCL has been my "default" CL implementation for a while now. It starts up really fast with Emacs/Slime (faster than any other CL implementation I've used on Mac OS X), has a small footprint, and I find the implentation source code quite easy/pleasant to read and understand. The guys at Clozure have been busy upgrading it for Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) release. When I was still using my PPC-based PowerBook, I would just use the latest OpenMCL release (v1.1). However, since moving over to a new Intel-based MacBook Pro, I decided to start using the CVS version of OpenMCL which has been re-branded as "Clozure Common Lisp" (CCL). OpenMCL/CCL runs on a variety of different architectures/OS'es. The Clozure web site and wiki could probably do with a bit of an overhaul as there are a mixture of references (some to OpenMCL and some to CCL) and the information tends to be scattered around a bit, but I believe that the following is accurate for the CVS version of CCL:
- Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) PPC 32 & 64
- Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Intel x86-64
- Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) PPC 32 & 64
- Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Intel x86-64
- Linux PPC 32 & 64
- Linux Intel x86-64
- FreeBSD Intel x86-64
To use the latest development copy of CCL on Leopard, you need to download a recent snapshot and then apply any changes from CVS to that snapshot. There is a wiki page that walks you through how to do this.
To read a bit more about OpenMCL/CCL, you should have a look at the wiki pages - these are a bit out-of-date, but they still contain useful information. The Openmcl-devel mailing list (also available via gmane) is an excellent resource.
