Clozure Associates develops, hosts, and maintains Clozure CL (aka CCL), formerly known as OpenMCL (see sidebar). Clozure CL is a fast, mature, open source Common Lisp implementation that runs on the following platforms:
Mac OS X (PowerPC and x86)
Linux (PowerPC and x86)
FreeBSD (x86)
Solaris (x86)
Microsoft Windows (x86)
There are both 32- and 64-bit versions for all platforms.
Clozure CL was forked from MCL in 1998 and the development has been entirely separate since.
Features include:
Very fast compilation speed.
A fast, precise, compacting, generational Garbage collector written in hand-optimized C. The sizes of the generations are fully configurable. Typically, a generation can be collected in a millisecond on Modern systems.
Fast execution speed, competitive with other Common Lisp implementations on most benchmarks.
Robust and stable. Customers report that their CPU-intensive, multi-threaded applications run for extended periods on Clozure CL without difficulty.
Full native OS Threads on all platforms. Threads are automatically distributed across multiple cores. The API includes support for shared memory, locking, and blocking for OS operations such as I/O.
Full Unicode support.
Full SLIME integration.
An IDE on the Mac OS X, fully integrated with the Macintosh window system and User Interface standards.
Excellent debugging facilities. The names of all local variables are available in a backtrace.
A complete, mature foreign function interface. This includes a powerful bridge to Objective-C and Cocoa on Mac OS X.
Many extensions including: files mapped to Common Lisp vectors for fast File I/O; thread local hash tables and streams to eliminate locking overhead; cons hashing support; ETC.
Very efficient use of memory
