[Openmcl-devel] M1

[Robert Goldman]

Mikel's post is quite helpful.  One minor additional point: ECL may work 
natively on M1, but as a lisp compiler it is not at all good. I don't 
even test my libraries on it any more because the code it generates is 
so sluggish.  I would definitely recommend SBCL over ECL.  If you are 
not comfortable with Emacs, and want M1 support, I'm afraid that 
LispWorks is really your only choice, unless the community can find some 
way to get CCL ported.

If it wasn't for the pandemic, I would suggest some sort of community 
get-together and hackathon, possibly at the European Lisp Symposium or 
... it would be great if there was another ILC.

Best,
R


On 21 Feb 2022, at 8:37, mikel evins wrote:

> > On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:13 AM, Joakim Sandgren 
> <info at joakimsandgren.com> wrote:
>>
>> is there a fee every year for lispworks ? /joakim
>>
>
> Sort of; not exactly.
>
> There's an initial purchase price that varies from zero (for the 
> crippled personal edition) to $4500 for the all-the-bells-and-whistles 
> enterprise edition.
>
> In addition, there is an optional annual maintenance subscription that 
> is $375 (for 32-bit versions) or $750 (for 64-bit). You don't have to 
> buy the annual maintenance, but if you do then you get free upgrades 
> when new major versions are released. If you don't have a maintenance 
> contract and want a new version, you have to pay full price.
>
> You also don't have to upgrade to new versions. If you want to, you 
> can buy a version of Lispworks, don't buy the maintenance contract, 
> and never spend another dime on the product. If you buy the 
> Professional or Enterprise edition, you can deliver all the apps you 
> want and do whatever you like with them (except build and distribute a 
> Lisp development environment) and you never owe them another dime.
>
> But you don't get source code for the Lisp. You get sources for the 
> editor, but that's all.
>
> CCL's unique value proposition is that it's a free, open-source Lisp 
> that integrates well with the native windowing system and other 
> platform frameworks on macOS. Unfortunately, it looks like macOS is 
> migrating to Apple Silicon and CCL isn't. As far as I know, there is 
> no other Lisp that substitutes for CCL's unique combination of 
> advantages.
>
> If you want a good Common Lisp that is free and gives you all of its 
> sources, SBCL is a good choice, but it doesn't offer good integration 
> with native windowing systems and doesn't offer a built-in native 
> windowing IDE. There are ways to build windowing apps with it, but 
> they aren't built in like CCL's support for macOS, and they're more 
> complicated to use.
>
> If you want good integration with native windowing systems—arguably 
> better than CCL, since it's cross platform—there's Lispworks, but 
> it's not free and doesn't give you the sources.
>
> If you want a free Lisp that offers at least some way to build native 
> windowing apps, there's ECL plus Qt. ECL works natively on M1. 
> However, setting up ECL with Qt is rather complicated, and ECL depends 
> on the platform C compiler to generate native code, which adds to the 
> configuration burden. Also, like SBCL, ECL lacks a windowing IDE, 
> unless you count Emacs and SLIME.
>
> So it looks like you can't get everything you want; you'll have to 
> decide which things are most important to you.