jameslinus / clasp

clasp Common Lisp environment

Clasp — Bringing Common Lisp and C++ Together

NOTE: June 22, 2016 - Build the 'testing' branch of Clasp along with the externals-clasp - for now.

What Is This?

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.

New Features

• Clasp has a completely new, optimizing/inlining compiler called cclasp!
• Fixnum, character and single-float types are immediate values.
• General object pointers and cons pointers are tagged for speed.
• Clbind library allows programmers to expose external C++ libraries.
• Lots of bug fixes and stability improvements.

Getting Clasp

Precompiled and prepackaged versions of Clasp are not yet available.

At the moment, Clasp is supported on Linux and Mac OS X. On these systems, you should be able to build it from source. In case you cannot get it to compile even with the instructions below, the quickest way to get help is to either file an issue, or to chat with us directly.

Building on most systems will take around 4GB of RAM and ~2 hours with a relatively modern processor, so be prepared to watch a movie or do some other useful work until Clasp is all done.

Building on Linux

For most distributions that have the listed dependencies available as packages, the compilation should be straightforward. Simply clone Clasp and run make from the root of it.

If the system is too dumb to find some of the dependencies or fails for other reasons, you might have to manually adjust configuration variables. For this, copy local.config.template to local.config and edit it as appropriate. If you lack the required dependencies, try compiling with externals-clasp.

The compilation output will be in the build/clasp directory. To launch Clasp, run build/clasp/bin/clasp_boehm_o.

Clasp has been successfully built on

• Ubuntu 14.04, see this wiki entry
• Debian Jessie
• Debian Sid
• Debian Wheezy
• OpenSuse 13.1
• Gentoo
• Arch, currently requires downgrading Clang and LLVM to 3.6 .

Building on OS X

First you will need what is listed for OS X under the dependencies. Next you need an additional step that is documented on the wiki. The rest of the procedure is the same as for building with externals-clasp.

The compilation output will be in the build/clasp directory. To launch Clasp, run build/clasp/MacOS/clasp_boehm_o.

Building With Externals-Clasp

If your system does not provide the external dependencies as required by Clasp, you can use this approach instead, which will compile them for you.

Clone externals-clasp to a directory on your system. Next, create a local.config containing export GCC_TOOLCHAIN = /usr if you are on Linux and export TOOLSET = clang if you are on OS X. Next, simply run make from the root of it. This will take some time to complete; maybe play a round of pinball or chat on IRC for a bit.

The next step is building Clasp itself. For this, clone it to a different folder and copy the local.config.template file within it to local.config. Next, open it up and make sure to uncomment and adapt the EXTERNALS_CLASP_DIR line to point to the location where you compiled externals-clasp. Something like export EXTERNALS_CLASP_DIR = /opt/externals-clasp. Finally it's time to kick off the build process. Simply run make from the Clasp root.

External Dependencies

Linux

Simply install the appropriate packages with your package manager.

• llvm 3.6
• clang 3.6, including headers.
• boost
• autoreconf (dh-autoreconf on Ubuntu and Arch (AUR))
• gmp 6.0.0, compiled with --enable-cxx
• expat 2.0.1
• zlib 1.2.8
• readline 6.2

OS X

Use either brew or ports to install the dependencies besides Xcode. Make sure the binaries are in your PATH.

• Xcode 6.4
• Xcode command-line tools
• automake
• autoconf
• libtool
• pkg-config

Common Lisp Ecosystem Support

Clasp supports SLIME, ASDF, and Quicklisp. As such, development as in other Common Lisp implementations should be rather straight forward.

Note that Clasp does not currently support several of the staple features such as CFFI, Bordeaux-Threads, and Unicode.

Reporting Problems

Generally you can report problems in two fashions, either by opening an issue ticket 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 versions of the external libraries that you have installed.
• A paste of the build log or failure point that you reached.
• Patience.

IRC

Clasp has an IRC channel on Freenode called #clasp. If you have questions, problems, suggestions, or generally would like to just hang out with us devs, come and stop by!

My Blog

More details on Clasp.

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) and the National Science Foundation (Grant number: 1300231).