LispWorks
LispWorks is a commercial implementation and IDE for the Common Lisp programming language. The software runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and several commercial UNIX systems.
The Common Lisp implementation at the heart of LispWorks is a descendant of the implementation of Lisp created by Richard P. Gabriel's company, Lucid Inc.. When Lucid folded in 1994 due to management issues, the Lisp software was sold to Harlequin. 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 [1].
Some of LispWorks's features are
- the 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
- a facility to generate standalone executables
The Enterprise edition also includes KnowledgeWorks, which adds Prolog features to Lisp; the CommonSQL database interface; and a CORBA binding.
LispWorks Ltd. and Franz Inc. are currently the two largest commercial Lisp companies. Franz and LispWorks take radically different approaches to the pricing of their products: LispWorks charges a fixed fee per platform per machine; Franz does the same but also requests a percentage of revenues generated with their product.