The SICL project

SICL (pronounce it as "sickle") is a project that has two main purposes:

• Provide portable modules for implementers of Common Lisp systems that provide some functionality that the Common Lisp language standard requires, and that can be implemented using only some other required features of the language without sacrificing performance of the result.
• Use those modules plus some non-portable code to implement a completely new Common Lisp system.

Some goals of the system and the individual modules are:

• Performance should be good; excellent if possible. Certainly comparable to the best existing systems.
• The system should be well documented, but when it comes to user documentation, i.e., documentation that the application programmer might want in order to be more productive in writing those applications, and when it comes to internal documentation, i.e., documentation that might be useful to someone who would like to understand how the system works, and who might want to improve it in some way.
• The system should be highly introspective, allowing the sophisticated user to inspect parts of the system with the use of tools provided by the system itself.
• The system should provide excellent tools for debugging user programs.
• The system should use internationalization so as to improve the learning curve for non-English native speakers. Internationalization would concern documentation, but also error messages.

The repository on GitHub contains a document that explains the state of various modules and the rest of the system, as well as plans for the rest.

SICL documents

A list of published papers with new techniques that can be used to improve some aspect of a Common Lisp implementation.

SICL-related libraries

A list of existing libraries that were written either specifically as part of the SICL project, or that were written independently, but that are essential for the SICL project.