Tag: Lisp

Clojure, Windows 8.1, and Emacs…

Years ago, I wrote a detailed post on getting Lisp running on Mac OS X. It remains one of my most-read posts, which is kind of cool, although that worries me a bit; a lot has changed since then, and I have no idea if it’s still the way to do it.

I have recently decided to try some things in Clojure, and I decided to set up my Surface Pro 3 with Clojure. This turned out to be a bit more difficult than I expected, actually; there’s a pretty good description at clojure-doc.org, but it didn’t work out of the box for me. You can Bing or Google for people’s setups, and that lead me closer to getting it working, but it was still pretty fiddly. Anyway, here’s what I did.

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Using Common Lisp on Mac OS X

I’ve been a Lisp nut for years. I was first exposed to Lisp on my TRS-80, when I was about thirteen; Randy Beer had written a Lisp introduction in the March ’83 issue of 80 Micro, and I remember reading it again and again. I’ve used various flavors of Lisp for exploratory prototyping programming over the years, and have enjoyed using both Scheme and Common Lisp.

Getting a dialect of Common Lisp running on Mac OS X isn’t hard — in fact, if you’re just setting out, an excellent choice is LispWorks Personal Edition. I’ve recently gotten to the point, however, where I’ve wanted to do some work with the Common Lisp Interface Manager, which isn’t supported in LispWorks Personal Edition under Mac OS X, and set out to configure a Common Lisp installation on my MacBook from the ground up.

It wasn’t difficult, although it took some Googling to get all the pieces together; shortly after I finished, someone on the Bay Area Functional Programmer‘s mailing list asked about running Common Lisp on Mac OS X, and I put together my notes on the topic and replied. The list is fairly small — less than 300 members — and I promised them and myself that I’d organize the notes and provide them in a more accessible location.

What follows is a step-by-step installation guide to installing Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and McCLIM on a PowerBook G4; I undertook this from the initial notes I took configuring the MacBook. I chose SBCL because it’s well-supported by the open source community and works well with McCLIM; I have nothing against other Common Lisp implementations, including Clozure. 

A word of warning is in order: I’m comfortable with Common Lisp, but relatively unfamiliar with how Common Lisp programmers handle package distribution. I get the basic idea behind ASDF, of course, but I’m not seasoned in its use. Consequently, I had a get-things-working-and-clean-up-later mentality when I undertook my first SBCL-McCLIM configuration, and this largely remained when I wrote what follows. Other Lisp developers may have better ways to organize their working environments, and I’d welcome positive comments (drop me an email, and we’ll figure out how to incorporate your feedback).

Starting out, you should have a relatively up-to-date Mac OS X box (I’ve done this on Mac OS X 10.4.x and 10.5.x systems). When you’re done, you will have installed Carbon Emacs, SLIME, SBCL, and McCLIM configured to work with the X Windows server Mac OS X provides, along with darcs. 

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