Armed Bear

The right of the people to keep and arm bears shall not be infringed!

About ABCL

Armed Bear Common Lisp (ABCL) is an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp that runs in a Java virtual machine. It provides a runtime system, a compiler that compiles Lisp source to JVM bytecode, and an interactive REPL for program development.

ABCL is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, with a special linking exception. If you link ABCL with your own program, then you do not need to release the source code for that program. However, any changes that you make to ABCL itself must be released in accordance with the terms of the GPL.

ABCL runs on platforms that support Java 1.4 (or later), including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

ABCL is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

The latest version is 0.0.10, released March 6, 2007.

Download

abcl-0.0.10.tar.gz (source, 632987 bytes)

abcl-0.0.10.zip (source, 1012345 bytes)

CVS

The project's SourceForge.net CVS repository can be checked out through anonymous (pserver) CVS with the following command:

      cvs -d:cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@armedbear-j.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/armedbear-j co j

Bugs

ABCL is a young implementation (particularly by Lisp standards). You are certain to encounter bugs.

ABCL 0.0.10 fails 67 out of 21696 tests in the GCL ANSI test suite.

ABCL's CLOS is intolerably slow and does not handle on-the-fly redefinition of classes correctly. There is no support for the long form of DEFINE-METHOD-COMBINATION, and certain other required CLOS features are also missing. Enough CLOS is there to run ASDF and CL-PPCRE, if you're in no hurry. There's no MOP worth mentioning.

Since this is an early public release, there might be build problems as well as runtime bugs.

Please report problems to the j development mailing list (armedbear-j-devel at lists.sourceforge.net).

Installation

The README file in the root directory of the source distribution contains instructions for building ABCL.

Java 1.4 or later is required. Java 1.5 is recommended. There are unresolved performance issues with Java 1.6. To build ABCL, you'll need the full JDK; the JRE is not enough.