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clasp-developers
clasp
Common Lisp2015–2025
clasp-developers / clasp

clasp

clasp Common Lisp environment

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
48Distinct people
95Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
2.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

clasp Common Lisp environment

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

The GDB JIT interface implementation is seriously flawed. I love GDB - but this causes me a LOT of grief when debugging clasp (Common Lisp implemented using llvm as the backend…

drmeister used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 7:02:50 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year95 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-02-21 13:20:00 UTC to 2025-07-09 22:57:28 UTC.

051015202015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 2 submissions, 10 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 18 mentions; 8 submissions, 10 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12210
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC18810
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Clasp — Bringing Common Lisp and C++ Together Clasp is a new Common Lisp implementation that seamlessly interoperates with C++ libraries and programs using LLVM for compilation to native code. This allows Clasp to take advantage of a vast array of preexisting libraries and programs, such as out of the scientific computing ecosystem. Embedding them in a Common Lisp environment allows you to make use of rapid prototyping, incremental development, and other capabilities that make it a powerful language. For more information on using Clasp, see: Clasp Manual clbind Documentation Releases See Releases for current releases of Clasp. For more information please see the Release Notes. Building Clasp At the moment, Clasp is supported on Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. On these systems, you should be able to build it from source and you may be able to install using a package manager. See the Wiki for more information. In case things go wrong, the quickest way to get help is to either file an issue, or to chat with us directly. Building takes a lot of resources. In parallel mode (:parallel-build t in config.sexp) you need more than 8 GB of RAM and it will be 1-2 hours build time. If you do not have 8 GB of RAM you can turn off the parallel build which will then run for a day or so. Make sure to have some paging space ("swapfile") configured. There is also docker image here. Common Lisp Ecosystem Support Clasp supports the following major components: SLIME ASDF Quicklisp CFFI Bordeaux-Threads Unicode Post on the issues or contact us if you're interested in changing that. Contributing to Clasp We very much welcome any kind of contribution to Clasp, even if it is just bug finding and testing. A lot can be done all around the project, if you want to dive into something large. See the Contributing file for the few guidelines we've set up around contributions. Reporting Problems Generally you can report problems in two fashions, either by opening a New Issue or by chatting with us directly. In both cases, though, you should have the following pieces handy in order for us to be able to help you out as quickly and painlessly as possible: Your operating system name and version. The branch that you're using of Clasp. A paste of the build log or failure point that you reached. Patience. IRC Clasp has an IRC channel on Libera called #clasp. If you have questions, problems, suggestions, or generally would like to just hang out with us devs, come and stop by! More on Clasp For more information on Clasp and the discussion around it, see the following sites: Christian Schafmeister's blog Hackernews Reddit Google Tech Talks ELS2016 Lessons Learned Implementing Common Lisp with LLVM Acknowledgments Clasp was supported by: The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DOD-DTRA) (HDTRA1-09-1-0009) The National Institutes of Health (NIH/NIGMS Grant number: 2R01GM067866-07A2) The National Science Foundation (Grant number: 1300231)
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

11 sources
jorams·Nov 21, 2015
The code base being a mess is a known problem. There's an issue open for the next release to get rid of all those useless files ([1]). The code has also recently been passed through clang-format, and in general the quality of the codebase appears to be improving as the number of people contributing to it is slowly increasing. A file having multiple copyright notices is actually common practice. It indicates that the code is based on older code, the copyright of which of course belongs to the original author, but that it has been significantly modified by the "new" author. I think it's important to note that up until recently this was basically a one-man project. It's in the early stages still. drmeister has since gotten some serious help organizing the project, which should (and looking at the issue tracker, I think it will) help a lot to
Read the rest
keep the project moving forward in the right direction. The 0.4 release seems to mark a point at which Clasp is usable and major issues with its functionality have been resolved. It's not in any way "finished". If you want to contribute or are just interested in the project I'd suggest joining #clasp on Freenode (as I did a couple of months ago). The channel is pretty active. [1]: https://github.com/drmeister/clasp/issues/41
In Clasp 0.4 – Joining Common Lisp and C++
jlarocco·Nov 21, 2015
I hate to be negative, but that code base is a complete mess. I looked into helping out on the project a few months ago, but stopped almost immediately when I saw the code. I'm a little sad that a release is being announced and the code is still a mess. For example, in the src/core directory there are about a million files, of types .txt, .cc, .cxml, .xml, .old, .py, .sh, .prototype, .csc, .pdb, .moe, .grep, *.fbp, etc., and many of them have mysterious names like "tf.csc" or "v.txt". And a lot of the files seem to have nothing to do with common lisp or C++, and contain mysterious 1 or 2 line code snippets or shell one liners. Honestly, it's just a terrible first impression. Are there any plans to clean it up and make it usable by other people? Edit: And perhaps more worrying, there are things like this https://github.com/drmeister/cl
Read the rest
asp/blob/master/src/clbind/cl..., where there's a copyright notice, and then immediately below it an older copyright notice to somebody else.
In Clasp 0.4 – Joining Common Lisp and C++
drmeister·Jul 1, 2015
I've implemented a Common Lisp that interoperates with C++ and uses LLVM as the backend because I was motivated by the same shortcomings in traditional software development languages and tools (https://github.com/drmeister/clasp). I choose Common Lisp rather than Scheme because the killer feature of Lisp is Macros and they are easier to use in Common Lisp than they are in Scheme. Also, Slime (Emacs interface to Common Lisp) is one of the most powerful software development environments available IMHO.
In John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language

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