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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

18 sources
mgsouth·Dec 26, 2022
Putting on my architect's hat--what is it the customer really wanting to do? So.. "Why do you want to make Lisp more popular? If you were sucessful, what would be different in the world, and why is that desirable to you?" Normally at this point I'd listen to the response, and ask more questions based on that. That would wind up with a very, very deep thread, so I'll break a cardinal rule and pre-guess at some answers. This kind of question comes up pretty frequently. In many cases, I suspect the motivation behind the question is "Wow! Here's this cool tool I've discovered. I want to make something really useful with it. I want to do it as part of a community effort; share my excitement with others, share in their excitement, and know that what I'm making is useful because others find it desirable and are excited by it." The field could be
Read the rest
cooking, sports, old machine tools, tiny homes, or demo scene. Its the fundemental driver for most content on HN, YouTube, Instructables, and such. It is a Good Thing. If that is your motivator, then my suggestion is to find something that bugs you and fix it. You've already decided you're only interested in code, not other aspects. You said you preferred vim, but the emacs ecosystem has a very rich set of sharp edges that need filing off, and a rich set of tools with which to attack them. One example: even after 50 years there's no open IDE which allows you to easily globally rename a Lisp identifier. I don't know about LispWorks or other proprietary environments, but you can't in emacs or vim do a right-click on "foo" in "(defun foo ()...)" and select a command which automatically renames it in all invocations. [Queue lots of "but you can..." replies here.] I don't think vim is up to the task of doing this internally. It would be possible in emacs; but would require a huge effort with lots of help from other people. If you emerged alive from that rabbit warren you'd join the company of Certified "How Hard Could it Be?" Mad Scientists such as Dr. "I just want to draw molecules" Meister [1] and "Wouldn't an OS in Lisp be Cool" Froggey [2]. [1] https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp [2] Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
In What help is needed for Lisp community in order to make Lisp more popular?
vindarel·Aug 17, 2022
CLASP? CL on LLVM. https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp/ > 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.
In The Jank Language: LLVM Hosted Clojure
vindarel·Jun 6, 2022
It's a great article. Since then, we have more tools and resources so we can enhance it: ## Pick and Editor The article is right that you can start with anything. Just `load` your .lisp file in the REPL. But even in Vim, Sublime Text, and Atom [and also VSCode] you can get pretty good to very good support. See https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... (also Lem, a CL editor that works for other languages, Jupyter notebooks, Eclipse (basic support) and LispWorks (proprietary, advanced graphical tools). > if anyone is interested in making a Common Lisp LSP language server, I think it would be a hugely useful contribution to the community. Here's a new project used for VSCode: https://github.com/nobody-famous/alive-lsp There's also https://github.com/cxxxr/cl-lsp ## Other resources I already linked to it, but the Cookbo
Read the rest
ok (to which I contribute) is a useful reference to see code and get things done, quickly. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/ While I'm at it, my first shameless plug: after my tutorials written for the Cookbook and my blog, I wanted to do more. Explain, structure, demo real-world Common Lisp. I'm creating this course (there are some free videos): https://www.udemy.com/course/common-lisp-programming/?coupon... (ongoing -50% coupon for June). ## Web Development See the Cookbook, and the awesome list (see below). We have many libraries, you still have to code for things taken for granted in other big frameworks. I have some articles on my blog. We have new very cool kids in town, especially CLOG, that is like a GUI for the browser. Check it out: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog ## Game Development See again the awesome-cl list. And the Kandria game, in the making, all done in CL: https://kandria.com/ (it just got accepted for a Swiss grant, congratulations). ## Unit Testing We have even more test frameworks since 2018! And some are actually good O_o ## Projects To create a full-featured CL project in one command, look no further, here's my (shameless plug again) project skeleton: https://github.com/vindarel/cl-cookieproject you'll find the equivalent for a web project, lighter alternatives in the README, and a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFc513MJjos&feature=youtu.be ## Libraries He doesn't mention this list, what a shame: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl => the CL ecosystem is probably bigger than you thought. Sincerely, only recently, great packages appeared: CLOG, cl-gserver (actors concurrency), 40ants-doc, official CL support on OVH through Platform.sh, great editor add-ons (Slite test runner, Slime-star modules…), Coalton 1.0 (Haskell-like ML on top of CL), April v1.0 (APL in CL), a Qt 5 "library" (still hard to install), many more… (Clingon CLI args parser, Lish, a Lisp Shell in the making, the Consfigurator deployment service, generic-cl)… His list is OK, I'd pick another HTTP client and another JSON library (new ones since 2018 too), but that's a detail. BTW, see also a list of companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ ## Community We are also on Discord: https://discord.gg/hhk46CE and on Libera Chat. ## Implementations CLASP (CL for C++ on LLVM) reached its v1.0, congrats. https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp/releases/tag/1.0.0 More are in the making… We got dynamic library delivery tool for SBCL (sbcl-librarian), more good stuff is coming… Allegro CL (proprietary) got a new version running in the browser… Crazy Lisp world <3
In A Road to Common Lisp (2018)

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