LispWorks
| Developer(s) | LispWorks Ltd |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 6.0
/ January 6, 2010 |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris (x86/x64 and SPARC), and HP UX |
| Type | IDE |
| Website | LispWorks |
LispWorks is a commercial implementation and IDE for the Common Lisp programming language. The software runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris (x86/x64, SPARC) and HP UX.
LispWorks was developed by the UK software company Harlequin Ltd., and first published in 1989[1]. Harlequin ultimately spun off its Lisp arm as Xanalys, which took over management and rights to LispWorks. In January 2005, the Xanalys Lisp team formed LispWorks Ltd. to market, develop, and support the LispWorks software.
Some of LispWorks's features are
- an implementation of the Common Lisp Object System with support for the Metaobject protocol
- native threads
- Unicode support: it can read and write Unicode files and supports strings encoded in UCS-2
- Foreign Language Interface (FFI) for interfacing with routines written in C
- the Common Application Programmer's Interface (CAPI) GUI toolkit, which provides native look-and-feel on Windows, Cocoa, and Motif
- an Emacs-like editor (source code is included in the Professional edition)
- a graphical debugger, inspector, stepper, profiler, class browser, etc.
- a native-code compiler for an extended ANSI Common Lisp
- a facility to generate standalone executables
- on Mac OS X it provides a bridge to Objective-C for using Apple's Cocoa libraries
- many of the libraries are written using the Common Lisp Object System and can be extended by the user (by writing subclasses and new methods)
The Enterprise edition also includes KnowledgeWorks, which adds Prolog features to Lisp; the CommonSQL database interface; and a CORBA binding. The Enterprise edition is also available as a 64bit implementation.
In September 2009, it had been announced that LispWorks 6 would support concurrent threads and the CAPI graphics toolkit has been extended to support GTK+[2]. LispWorks 6 was released January 2010[3].
LispWorks ran on the spacecraft Deep Space 1. The application called RAX won the NASA Software of the Year award in 1999[4].