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

clasp

clasp Common Lisp environment

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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, 6:01:08 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

10 sources
nextos·Oct 3, 2017
Yes, Chez & Stalin are the fastest in these benchmarks, which seems to match what the community usually answers when asked about quick implementations. Sadly Stalin is unmaintained. Its whole program optimization techniques were really advanced. I remember it even got my ivory-tower professors, who were big in the static analysis field, excited. Now, a tricky question. I'm mostly unfamiliar with Scheme for writing real-world code. Will the ongoing merger of Chez with Racket make the latter a clear winner in the Scheme camp? How are libraries and FFI? A problem with Scheme is excessive fragmentation. Having a clear winner would be cool for library support. Racket is great due to multiple paradigms and DSLs [1]. I hope it eventually becomes a very practical Lisp with all Mozart/Oz semantic goodies. I am trying to do all my projects in a Lis
Read the rest
p. Lately this is either Clojure or SBCL. Both have good libraries and decent FFIs. Clasp (Common Lisp on LLVM) [2] has gotten me excited, as good interfacing with C++ will be great to access a lot of quick numerics code. [1] https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/domain-specific-languag... [2] https://github.com/drmeister/clasp
In Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
devrandomguy·Aug 22, 2017
I wonder, would it be better to have something like an LLVM frontend for Clojure, rather than another new Scheme? Or, would we still have a long startup time, regardless of the platform? I know Clojure's startup time isn't to be blamed on the JVM, but since Clojurescript does not suffer from that issue, I'm not really sure where the problem is. Looks like that's actually a work in progress: https://github.com/drmeister/clasp
In R7RS Considered Unifier of Previous Standards (2015) [pdf]
e12e·Jul 19, 2017
My initial thought was that this was about a project building atop of clasp, like CANDO: https://youtu.be/5bQhGS8V6dQ?t=322 https://github.com/drmeister/clasp https://github.com/drmeister/cando But this does seem a bit more like Julia? "Julia: to Lisp or not to Lisp?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK3zRXhrFZY Then there's also the Axiom system, which I guess is primarily for symbolic computation, but I don't know if it might make sense to use it as a building block for statistical software? http://axiom-developer.org/
In Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System [pdf]
e12e·Jul 16, 2017
My initial thought was that if you want to rewrite emacs, why not rewrite it in common lisp? Apparently there are a few cl editors/ides - along the "original emacs" path - but like all things GNU I gather GNU Emacs is more than "just" (a) Free Emacs. Now, there's a fairly recent (and active) project for implementing a common lisp in c++[clasp] -- perhaps making a real common lisp in rust would make sense? [clasp] https://github.com/drmeister/clasp
In Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
FrozenVoid·Jun 5, 2017
Many Lisp and Scheme compilers have C output. Embeddable Common Lisp https://common-lisp.net/project/ecl/ GNU Common Lisp http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/ ManKai Common Lisp https://common-lisp.net/project/mkcl/ Clasp (C++ interop )https://github.com/drmeister/clasp ThinLisp https://sourceforge.net/projects/thinlisp/ https://github.com/aoh/owl-lisp Bigloo Scheme CHICKEN Scheme Gambit Scheme https://github.com/justinethier/cyclone RScheme SCM Stalin
In The Lisp Curse (2011)
lispm·Apr 10, 2017
https://github.com/drmeister/clasp From the CLASP page: > 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. you wrote: > This project uses LLVM's API, which is sadly difficult to utilize outside of C++. I would guess that you could use LLVM's API via CLASP. The author initially wrote ( https://drmeister.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/announcing-clasp/) : > Clasp exposes the LLVM C++ library within Common Lisp providing a rich, dynamic, progra
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mming environment for exploring the LLVM library and for writing new compilers that generate LLVM-IR. Then you could write the parser/compiler in Lisp, which supports manipulating s-expressions on a simpler level than C++ does.
In Dale – A Lisp-flavoured C

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