sbcl-setup.html

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<header>
  <h1 class="title">SBCL Setup</h1>
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<p>Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is aggressively maintained with
releases approximately monthly. SBCL has a long history, with its
source code stretching back to the early &#8217;80s under different
systems. This tutorial recommends SBCL due to its popularity at the
time of writing. Other opens source systems such as ECL, CLISP, CMUCL,
and CCL exist.</p>
<h2 id="installing-on-linux-and-osx">Installing on Linux and OSX</h2>
<p>Linux is the &#8220;home OS&#8221; of SBCL. The installation
procedure also works the same easy way for OSX. Typically the best way
to start is to download the binary
from <a href="http://www.sbcl.org">SBCL</a> and install it.</p>
<p>The procedure for installing it on your system runs as so:</p>
<pre><code>tar xjf &lt;sbcl-binary&gt;
    cd sbcl-&lt;version-name&gt;
    sudo sh ./install.sh</code></pre>
<p>After that, execute sbcl at the command line and you should find
the REPL! Congratulations!</p>
<p>SBCL&#8217;s REPL is designed to be used in an environment such as
emacs&#8217; SLIME interface. Check the IDE help page for more
information.</p>
<h2 id="linedit">Linedit</h2>
<p>The tool Linedit should provide some reasonable CLI capabilities for users.</p>
<p>In order to load it into SBCL, copy and paste the following snippet:</p>
<pre class="sourceCode commonlisp"><code class="sourceCode commonlisp">(progn
    (ql:quickload :linedit)
    (require :sb-aclrepl)
    (require :linedit)
    (funcall (intern &quot;INSTALL-REPL&quot; :linedit) :wrap-current t))</code></pre>
<h2 id="installing-on-windows">Installing on Windows</h2>
<p> Install the Scoop package manager. To do this, open PowerShell and type: ' iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh') ' (minus single quotes).
Review the permissions for Scoop and and accept them if you are comfortable with them </p>
<p> Type: scoop install sbcl (no special permissions needed!) into PowerShell, and you're all set! Restart the shell and you can start working in SBCL! </p>

<h2 id="further-installation-on-linuxosx">Further installation on Linux/OSX</h2>
<p>Sometimes the SBCL you pick up from sbcl.org isn&#8217;t as feature-complete as you want, or perhaps you want to recompile it for your own reasons (i.e., the Hunchentoot web server requires threads).</p>
<p>In order to do this, download the <em>source</em> SBCL package and issue this set of commands:</p>
<pre class="sourceCode bash"><code class="sourceCode bash">sh ./make.sh --fancy
    pushd doc/manual/ &amp;&amp; make &amp;&amp; popd
    sudo sh ./install.sh</code></pre>
<ul>
  <li><p>&#8211;fancy builds with several optional features as of 1.1.3: :sb-core-compression :sb-xref-for-internals :sb-after-xc-core, plus threading on supported platforms.</p></li>
  <li><p>For platforms with very limited memory, &#8211;dynamic-space-size=<MB> can help ensure that you don&#8217;t blow the internal Lisp heap.</p></li>
</ul>
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