An implementation of Common Lisp in development, reached version 1.6
Details
- External ID
- 48105458
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A Common Lisp implementation in development
- Website domain
- nongnu.org
- Launched
- May 12, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 27
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7859450726978998
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
It reached version 1.6, now it covers more than 80% of the standard. alisp ships with ASDF and is capable of loading many real-world systems, let me know if your favorite system succeeds! License is GPL3 or later, no LLMs used.
Enrichment
- Theme
- DeepSeek model deployment and inference
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- common lisp implementation
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Implementing a standard-compliant Common Lisp runtime (including CLOS, condition systems, and ASDF compatibility) requires deep programming language theory and compiler design expertise.
What it would actually take: Creating a Common Lisp implementation covering 80%+ of the ANSI standard involves writing an interpreter/compiler, garbage collector, reader macro system, condition handling runtime, CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) generic dispatch engine, and complex array/type systems. It requires thousands of hours of specialized compiler and language runtime engineering to pass test suites and boot complex systems like ASDF.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ECL, CLISP
Concerns raised: Managing complexity of huge all-in-one main.c file, Completeness - achieving 100% implementation
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 9 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #6 of 10 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 188 days after the earliest competitor.
- Julius, a New Lisp Implementation · hn · 2026-05-03 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Interactive Common Lisp: An Enhanced REPL · hn · 2025-12-14 · 101 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Metaspec: The DpANS3R Common Lisp Spec in S-Expr and HTML Format · hn · 2026-06-24 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- GDSL · hn · 2026-03-15 · 89 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- I wrote a technical history book on Lisp · hn · 2026-02-17 · 252 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- I created a RAW to HDRI stacker in (mostly) Common Lisp · hn · 2026-06-05 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- I forced Claude to play Tetris in Emacs · hn · 2026-04-11 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.31
- Wosp · hn · 2025-11-05 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.30
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.