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Lisp implementations I consider test driving

Common Lisp

Lots of features, standardized, solid standard library, usable for real world programming.

SBCL

Most popular implementation

ECL

It’s embedded and as light-weight as you wish it to be.

MOCL

Experimental, proprietary variant using LLVM to produce backend code for Android and iOS applications.

Scheme

An elegant and simple Lisp dialect, frequently chosen as a language to implement for fun and profit.

Guile

The official GNU extension language. Not only can it be embedded in an existing project, using it also allows one to compile a supported frontend language to its bytecode. Also usable on its own, thanks to the good FFI there’s more than enough interesting things built with it.

Chicken

Compiles to C, very good C interop, lots of modules.

Racket

Hosts Scheme dialects particularly suitable for education. The #lang feature allows building your own variants easily.

Gambit

Another Scheme compiling to C, together with SchemeSpheres you get a lot of standard libraries and can develop for mobile and desktop at the same time.

Hosted Lisps

These strive for neither usefulness nor elegance, but rather live on a widely established runtime and encourage interoperation with it. You borrow both strengths and weaknesses of the platform utilized.

Clojure

The most famous of them all. Runs on the JVM, has some interesting concepts on its own, one of them being Concurrency by STM.

Clojurescript

A variant of Clojure compiling to Javascript.

Rouge

Uses Ruby, looks a lot like Clojure.

Hy

Runs on Python, looks a bit like Clojure.

CljPerl

Runs on Perl 5.

Pharen

Take Lisp and compile it to PHP.

LisPHP

Lisp REPL, interpreter and embeddable sandbox implemented in PHP.

MoonLisp

Written by the author of MoonScript in MoonScript, a language that compiles to Lua, just like CoffeeScript compiles to JavaScript.

Lisp-flavoured Erlang

Lispy frontend to Erlang, completely compatible with existing code.

Joxa

Another Erlang-powered Lisp dialect which draws inspiration from Common Lisp and Clojure. It’s less powerful (and hopefully simpler to make up for that).

Gherkin

Runs on Bash.

Others

The following don’t fit a particular category.

Hylas

Implemented on LLVM, tries to be a “wide-spectrum” language by giving one the option to escape to lower-level constructs and data types when needed.

PicoLisp

A radical dialect with an emphasis on simplicity in exchange for reduced complexity. Database objects are first class, tunability is especially important.

FemtoLisp

Very lightweight dialect, embeddable and used by Julialang as compiler frontend.

Emacs Lisp

Surprisingly fun to work with, cool runtime that happens to do lots of things including actually editing text. Great for developing UI demos.

Total count

22 Lisp dialects.

@claudiunv
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Phel (git) is a functional programming language that compiles to PHP

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