Installation

Installation, specifically, of Steel Bank Common Lisp on a Linux (GNU/Linux if you prefer) system.

SBCL is mostly written in Lisp. If you want to compile it, you will need a Lisp compiler. Either you can get a binary SBCL, or you can use CMUCL, OpenMCL or CLISP to build from. In theory it will build from any reasonable ANSI-compatible Lisp, but in practice we've managed to find places in most Lisps that aren't quite compatible or where we depend on unportable behaviour that happens to work the same in all implementations we've tested so far. All I'm saying here is that if you're new to Lisp and you want to build SBCL, try first a compiler that someone else has already confirmed as working.

OK, where do we get SBCL, then?

• Your distribution may have packaged it. This is especially likely for Debian, Gentoo, and possibly Fedora: others I don't know about. Depending on the distro it might be out of date, badly installed, or missing features (like multithreading) that you want to use, but it should be good enough to build from.
• Sometimes we put binary tarballs on Sourceforge. It doesn't happen for every release - it depends on whether anybody gets around to it, but if there's anything tolerably recent for your machine, you can install that and use it to build a current release. This is probably your best option: just unpack the tarball and run sh install.sh
• You can get another Lisp and build from that. CMUCL is recommended for x86 or SPARC, OpenMCL for PPC. CLISP usually works but you might need a particularly bleeding edge version of it, and it'll probably be quite slow (not that SBCL is a speed demon either, but ...)

Now read the README and INSTALL files. I usually build SBCL with some non-standard features: to wit

:; cat customize-target-features.lisp
(LAMBDA (LIST) (list* :sb-thread :sb-futex :sb-ldb :sb-after-xc-core list))

To find out what features are available and what they do, look at base-target-features.lisp-expr. To use threads, you need to be running x86 Linux. For futex locking (strongly recommended) you also want kernel 2.6, or some vendor port of 2.4 that includes NPTL support (e.g. the Red Hat 9 kernel). Back to index