CLISP
From Free net encyclopedia
CLISP is a Common Lisp implementation. It is part of the GNU project, originally developed by Bruno Haible and Michael Stoll for Atari. It includes both an interpreter and a compiler (that compiles to bytecode), as well as a debugger, a socket interface, a high-level foreign language interface, strong internationalization support, and an object system (CLOS, MOP). It is written in C and Common Lisp.
Bruno Haible did not originally intend to distribute CLISP under the GPL, but in a well-publicised e-mail exchange with Richard Stallman, he eventually agreed to do so. The issue at stake was whether CLISP was a derivative work of the GNU readline library.
CLISP is extremely portable, running on almost all UNIX-based operating systems (including Linux and all BSD derivatives), as well as on Windows. CLISP is incapable of true compilation to binaries, but although interpreting bytecodes is usually slower than running compiled native code, this is not always a major issue (especially in applications like Web development where I/O is the bottleneck).
Paul Graham used CLISP to run the software for his Viaweb startup. Viaweb was the first web application; portions of it still exist as Yahoo! Stores.