Recommendations for a lisp setup on Mac OS X (any dialect)?

Question

What is your Mac OS X (Intel) based lisp setup (of any dialect), how do you like it, and how painful was it to set up? I'm looking for a versatile lisp that is easy to set up, but if you feel strongly about investing more effort, or even money, I would like to hear why you think it's worth it.

I am currently using newLisp, which was a breeze to set up and gives me simple access to things like graphics and sound. I have heard of SBCL with emacs and slime, but that seems a real pain to set up, and I'm still not friends with emacs. I want to see if there's anything I'm missing out on. I would primarily be using this for pleasure, with no commercial goal in mind.

Please recommend only one setup per answer to enable voting, but feel free to submit multiple answers.

Answer 1

You could install guile. I'd use fink.

That is easy, but it gives you a fairly lightweight scheme installation.

Answer 2

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "setup". Clozure CL (previously Open MCL) has an experimental Cocoa bridge, and you can even build a smallish IDE as well (just fire it up and do a (require "COCOA-APPLICATION") and it'll build the .app bundle for you). I use vim myself, but you're free to use whatever editor you like (+ Interface Builder), of course. CCL supports Emacs+Slime, but does not require it.

Answer 3

The best Lisp for Mac OS X is LispWorks. It is commercial though. Installation is done with an installer in a few seconds. It is started then with a double-click from the programs folder. It has a Cocoa-Bridge and the user interface is written with it, but based on a portable substrate - so the same development environment is available for Windows and Unix/Linux/FreeBSD.

Answer 4

Ready Lisp:

Ready Lisp is a binding together of several popular Common Lisp packages especially for Mac OS X, including: Aquamacs, SBCL and SLIME. Once downloaded, you’ll have a single application bundle which you can double-click – and find yourself in a fully configured Common Lisp REPL.

It’s ideal for OS X users who want to try out the beauty of Common Lisp with a minimum of hassle. It could also be used by teachers to give their Mac students a free, complete Common Lisp environment to take home with them.

Answer 5

General Comments

Most lisps are not that hard to set up on OS X if you're used to working on the command line, though some are harder than others. I think the hardest to set up are CMUCL and Clozure; if memory serves, you need to make a symbolic link into a directory on your path if you don't want to run them from their respective directories (they don't install an executable into /usr/local/bin on installation). In any case, you'll put more work into getting Slime going in Emacs than you will actually installing a lisp. New Lisp is an easy install from the OS X gui, installed from a OS X package (making it the easiest install of all lisps except, perhaps, for PLT Scheme).

I do recommend using a some form of IDE, be it Emacs + Slime or the LispWorks or Clozure IDEs. People use other editors, but those are the ones that have been tailored most to programming in lisp. Personally, I wouldn't enjoy programming in lisp if I couldn't use Emacs + Slime, but I've put in a lot of time to learn the Emacs and Slime commands.

Implementation Recommendation

Here is a specific recommendation that is different from the others. If you are new to lisp and not too picky that it be Common Lisp, you should look at PLT Scheme. It comes with an IDE and an implementation (DrScheme and mzscheme) that can't be beat for ease of installation and use for a beginner. PLT Scheme comes with lots of extensions to Scheme that make is easier to use for more programming tasks than the other Schemes as well.

Answer 6

Try PLT Scheme. It is mature, has lot of libraries and comes with an IDE.

Answer 7

Clojure is a wonderful lisp. it is truly modern lisp designed for pragmatic concurrent programming. It compiles to the JVM and can call and be called by java nativity with no wrapping and a minimum of ceremony.

clojure.org

Answer 8

try: XMLisp for OS X (FOSS)

3D: Open Agent Engine: scene graph based mini engine, 3D objects, animation, mouse hovering, selection, camera control, texture management 2D: controls: layout managers, buttons, sliders, text

http://code.google.com/p/xmlisp/

It is an extension of Clozure CL. IDE is included. You should be able to get this running in no time.

Alex

Answer 9

Gambit scheme is a "complete, portable, efficient and reliable implementation of the Scheme programming language":

Gambit consists of two main programs: gsi, the Gambit Scheme interpreter, and gsc, the Gambit Scheme compiler. The interpreter contains the complete execution and debugging environment. The compiler is the interpreter extended with the capability of generating executable files. The compiler can produce standalone executables or compiled modules which can be loaded at run time.

The Gambit compiler allows Scheme to be compiled to C, with some pretty cool applications, like writing an iPhone app in Scheme (with a REPL for remote debugging).

There is a FFI for Gambit so you can use external C libraries.

There is an installer or you can install via MacPorts.