Oliver Kullmann <O.Kullmann at swansea.ac.uk> wrote:
From my point of view, the situation using Lisp seems pretty bad (see below).
> Or just go grab a binary of sbcl (or cmucl or ccl).
I do not use binaries for various reasons (taking them altogether):
Yes you do, unless you compiled one of those "bigger Linux
distributions" entirely from sources. If you managed to do that without
starting with some prebuilt binary Linux distribution, I'd like to know
how you accomplished this feat.
What has you tied up in knots is your need to bootstrap, and while the
starting boundary you have chosen (a working binary Linux, C compiler,
etc.) is a reasonable one, it is also arbitrary. Once you have built
any open source Common Lisp using a binary, that implementation should
be capable of rebuilding itself (thereby guranteeing the build is clean,
if that is your concern). This is absolutely no different from building
a Linux and C compiler from sources.
By the way, the language you are trying to build is called "Common
Lisp", not "Lisp". The recently departed John McCarthy asked the Common
Lisp community (at least) to recognize that "Lisp" denotes a family of
languages, and that he did not want any particular single dialect to
appropriate the name.