Clozure CL (often called CCL for short) is a free Common Lisp implementation with a long history. Some distinguishing features of the implementation include fast compilation speed, native threads, a precise, generational, compacting garbage collector, and a …

Clozure CL is a fast, mature, open source Common Lisp implementation that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Windows. Clozure CL was forked from Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) in 1998 and the development has been entirely separate since. When it was forked from MCL in 1998, the new Lisp was named OpenMCL.

Clozure CL provides the function CCL:SAVE-APPLICATION, which creates a file containing an archived Lisp memory image.

Clozure CL consists of two parts: the lisp kernel, and the heap image. When the lisp kernel starts, it locates the heap image, loads it into memory, and starts running lisp code. In the ccl directory, you will find heap images and pre-compiled lisp kernel binaries for your platform.

Clozure CL includes the ccl and ccl64 command shell scripts. For details on configuring a shell script for your environment, see Section 2.3.1, “The ccl Shell Script” . 2.2.4.4.

Clozure CL compiles and loads the various subsystems that make up the IDE, then constructs a Cocoa application bundle named "Clozure CL.app" and saves the Lisp image into it. Normally Clozure CL creates the application bundle in the root directory of the Clozure CL distribution.

A work-in-progress manual documenting the internals of Clozure CL is available as a single HTML file. This internals manual is built from the CCLDoc files in the docs/internal directory inside the CCL directory.

Clozure CL is distributed via GitHub. Please see the current release page for release notes and download instructions. This is a screencast that shows an example of how you would install CCL from source on Linux.

Clozure CL is a fast, mature, open source Common Lisp implementation that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Windows. Clozure CL was forked from Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) in 1998 and the development has been entirely separate since.

In CCL 1.2 and later, the #& reader macro can be used to access foreign variables; this functionality depends on the presence of "vars.cdb" files in the interface database. The current behavior of the #& reader macro is to: