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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 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:17:07 AM 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

4 sources
vindarel·Dec 16, 2020
Some pointers: Scorecloud (https://scorecloud.com/), a music composition software (you sing, it writes music) comes from research, and is built in Common Lisp. pgloader was rewritten from Python to Lisp: https://tapoueh.org/blog/2014/05/why-is-pgloader-so-much-fas... because of Python's poor performances and threading capacities. A theorem prover used in the industry: https://github.com/acl2/acl2 A Lisp vendor selling semantic graph solutions: https://franz.com/ (see also its success stories for industry examples) Here's a sadder story: a team switched from CL to Go for production, but still use CL for prototyping: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/pro-mailing-list-on-comm... Some use CL in bioinformatics (and claim it's the best tool for the job). For example, they create a new Lisp implementation: https://github.com/clasp-developers/c
Read the rest
lasp More success stories: https://lisp-lang.org/success/
In Ask HN: I want to start learning Lisp. Where do I begin?
drmeister·Sep 30, 2020
Lisp (Common Lisp) beats all the other dynamic languages by a considerable margin. This is why I am developing Clasp - a Common Lisp implementation based on LLVM that interoperates with C++/C (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git) for scientific programming. With Clasp, we get the best of multiple worlds. We get a dynamic language (Common Lisp) with automatic memory management and enormous expressive power that can directly use powerful C and C++ libraries. All three of these languages are "long-lived" languages in that code that was written 10 and 20 years ago still works. Performance is really important to me and I have written a lot of code over the past four decades. I won't develop meaningful code in any language that falls below Racket in table 4 because these language implementations are too inefficient. I furthermore wan
Read the rest
t to keep using my code over the years and decades and so I won't develop meaningful code in any language where someone else can break my code by changing the standard. My program "leap" was written 27 years ago in C and it is still being used daily by thousands of computational chemists. But it's really hard to improve leap because the code is brittle largely because of malloc/free-style memory management (brrr). For a compiled, high-performance, standard language with proven lasting power and performance - Common Lisp is the best choice.
In Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages [pdf]
drmeister·Aug 26, 2020
I can testify to a lot of the difficulties Robert Strandh talks about here. We implemented a Common Lisp in C++ that interoperates with C++ (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git). I ended up implementing a lot more C++ code than I wanted to and then replacing much of it with Common Lisp versions (during startup) because it's easier to maintain and we can use type inference to improve the performance of Common Lisp code while C++ code is 'stuck' with the types you compile it with. Bootstrapping is hard.
In Creating a Common Lisp implementation, part 1 [video]

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