GoKawiilClamiga -- Common Lisp for the Amiga
After the ACE BASIC posts of the last months, this one is about a different project I have been working on for the last half year: CL-Amiga, or Clamiga for short. It is a Common Lisp implementation built for the Amiga family -- classic AmigaOS 3 on 68k and MorphOS as a fully native PPC build, AROS and AmigaOS 4 maybe to come -- but it also runs on macOS (I use it as my main Common Lisp impl here where most of the development happens) and Linux.
The name is simple: Common Lisp for the Amiga becomes CL-Amiga, and said out loud that is "Clamiga". And since amiga is Spanish/Portuguese for a (female) friend (Amiga users should know), the name does double duty: the Lisp that runs on your Amiga, and the Lisp that is your amiga ;).
(see project link at the bottom)
A few words about Common Lisp
Common Lisp is one of the older programming languages still in active use. Yes, it is used in industry and many other domains. The ANSI standard is from 1994 and has not changed since -- and yet the language feels surprisingly modern (usually old Common Lisp programs that are ANSI compliant compile also on modern compilers). It has a full object system with multiple dispatch (CLOS), a condition system that goes beyond exceptions, macros that let you extend the language itself, and an incredibly interactive, image-based development style where you compile and redefine functions in a live running system. Many "new" language features of the last decades existed in Common Lisp long before.
I won't repeat all of that here. If you want a proper introduction, I wrote a primer a few years ago: Common Lisp - Oldie but goldie. There is also a post about functional programming in Common Lisp if you find that interesting.
Why another Common Lisp implementation?
There are excellent Common Lisp implementations out there -- SBCL, CCL, ECL, Clasp, CLISP (unmaintained in decades), or even commercial ones like LispWorks and Allegro.
But none of them run on the Amiga. The high-performance implementations (SBCL, CCL) are native-code compilers tied to modern architectures -- x86-64, ARM, PPC -- with no 68k backend and a memory footprint measured in tens of megabytes. Clasp is built on LLVM. CLISP, the closest in spirit -- a compact bytecode interpreter written in C -- is unmaintained for many years and has not had an AmigaOS build in decades.
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