Awesome Common Lisp

A curated list of awesome Common Lisp libraries.

For awesome software, see lisp-lang.org’s success stories and the awesome-cl-software list.

All libraries listed here are available from Quicklisp unless stated otherwise. The ones marked with a :star: are so widespread and solid that they became community standards. You can’t be wrong with them. This is the case for Quicklisp, BordeauxThreads and such. Libraries denoted with a 👍 are the ones we like and want to promote here at the Awesome-cl list. They proved solid, they may solve a problem better than a community standard but they aren’t as widespread, or not considered as stable. For example, we prefer Spinneret over Cl-Who.

Add something new! See the contributing section for adding something to the list.

This is released under the GNU Free Documentation License - its text is provided in the LICENSE file. This repository is also mirrored on NotABug - a fully-free (as in libre) alternative to Github. Preference is given to free software and sellers who aren’t evil for physical resources.

Table of Contents

Audio

Build Systems

:star: ASDF - Another System Definition Facility; a build system for Common Lisp. Expat.

asdf-linguist - Extensions for ASDF. Expat.

asdf-viz - a tool to visualize the library dependencies of ASDF systems, the call graph of a function and the class inheritances. LLGPL.

Compilers, code generators

APL

April - The APL programming language (a subset thereof) compiling to Common Lisp. Replace hundreds of lines of number-crunching code with a single line of APL. Apache2.

C, C++

cmacro - Lisp macros for C. MIT.

C-mera - a source-to-source compiler that utilizes Lisp’s macro system for meta programming of C-like languages. GPL3.

lispc - a powerful “lispsy” macrolanguage for C. MIT.

ecrepl - an interactive REPL for the C language. BSD_2Clause.

Software-Evolution-Library - The SEL enables the programmatic modification and evaluation of software (C/C++ support using Clang, compiled assembler, and linked ELF binaries). GPL3.

Crypto

:star: Ironclad - A library of crypto functions for Common Lisp. Not considered secure, but is still useful for the message digest functions. Expat.

crypto-shortcuts - Collection of common crypto shortcuts. Artistic License 2.0.

trivial-ssh - An SSH client library. Expat.

cl-ssh-keys - Common Lisp system for generating and parsing of OpenSSH keys. BSD_3Clause.

cl-bcrypt - Common Lisp system for parsing and generating bcrypt password hashes. BSD_3Clause. see also cl-pass, using pbkdf2.



Cryptocurrencies

cl-monero-tools - Common Lisp toolbox to work with the Monero cryptocurrency. GPL3. Not in Quicklisp.

emotiq - a next-generation blockchain with an innovative natural-language approach to smart contracts. MIT.

peercoin-blockchain-parser - parse the blockchain contained in a file and export some of its data to a text file, a SQL script or a database. It can also create a database using the RPC of a Peercoin daemon as source of data instead of a blockchain file. LGPL3. Not in Quicklisp.

peercoin-calculator - This program gives you the probability of generating a POS or POW block within 10 minutes, 24 hours, 31 days, 90 days and 1 year, as well as the reward that can be expected. GUI in Qt. GPL3. Not in Quicklisp.

peercoin-vote - A voting system based on data from the blockchain (addresses and balances). GPL3. Not in Quicklisp.

See also legochain, a simple educational blockchain.

Database

cl-yesql - SQL statements live in their own files, in SQL syntax, and are imported into Lisp as functions. You are not limited to the features a DSL supports. Based on Clojure’s Yesql. MIT.

ORMs

:star: clsql - An SQL database with a Common Lisp interface. LLGPL.

👍 mito - An ORM for Common Lisp with migrations, relationships and PostgreSQL support LLGPL. mitho-auth, a mixin class for use authorization; mito-attachment, a mixin class for file management outside of RDBMS.

cl-dbi - A database-independent interface for Common Lisp. LLGPL. dbd-oracle - an Oracle database driver for CL-DBI. LLGPL.

crane - Another ORM. Expat.

datafly - A lightweight database library. 3-clause BSD.

sxql - A DSL for generating SQL. 3-clause BSD.

Persistent object databases

bknr.datastore - a CLOS-based lisp-only database in RAM with transaction logging persistence. Manual. licence. (see also chap. 21 of “Common Lisp Recipes”)

ubiquitous - A library providing easy-to-use persistent configuration storage. Artistic License 2.0.

cl-prevalence - in-memory database system. Implementation of Object Prevalence, in which business objects are kept live in memory and transactions are journaled for system recovery. github fork. LLGPL. See also cl-prevalence-multimaster, to syncronize multiple cl-prevalence systems state.

Graph databases

cl-agraph, a minimal client for AllegroGraph. AllegroGraph is a horizontally distributed, multi-model (document and graph), entity-event knowledge graph technology. It is proprietary and has a free version with a limit of 5 million triples.

cl-neo4j - neo4j RESTFUL client interface.

vivace-graph - graph database & Prolog implementation. Takes design inspiration from CouchDB, neo4j and AllegroGraph. It implements an ACID-compliant object graph model with user-defined indexes and map-reduce views. It also implements a master / slave replication scheme for redundancy and horizontal read scaling. Querying the graph is accomplished via a number of Lisp methods or via a Prolog-like query language. MIT.

facts - an in-memory graph database with transactions and rollbacks, logging/replay and dumping/loading to/from disk. BSD-style license (ISC).

Wrappers

:star: postmodern - A library for interacting with PostgreSQL. zlib.

cl-sqlite - Bindings for SQLite. Public domain.

cl-memcached - Fast, thread-safe interface to the Memcached object caching system. Expat.

cl-mongo - MongoDB client. Expat.

cl-redis - Redis client. Expat.

cl-disque - Disque client. 3-clause BSD.

cl-rethinkdb - RethinkDB client. Expat.

clouchdb - Library for interacting with CouchDB. FreeBSD.

cl-migratum - a system which provides facilities for performing database schema migrations, designed to work with various databases. BSD_3Clause.

postmodern-passenger-pigeon - a migration manager for postmodern. No licence specified.

To third parties

dyna - an AWS DynamoDB ORM. MIT.

cl-influxdb - an interface to the Time Series Database InfluxDB. MIT.

pgloader - a data loading tool for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL Licence.

Data Structures

👍 str - a modern, simple and consistent string manipulation library. MIT.

👍 FSet - A functional, set-theoretic collections data structure library. LLGPL.

trivial-extensible-sequences - Portability library for the extensible sequences protocol (SBCL documentation). zlib.

bst - Binary Search Tree. GPL3. Not in Quicklisp.

pileup - a portable, performant, and thread-safe binary heap for Common Lisp. MIT.

sycamore - a fast, purely functional data structure library. BSD_3Clause.

genhash – hash table implementation with API from generic methods. Public domain.

cl-ctrie - lock-free, concurrent, key/value index with efficient memory-mapped persistence and fast transient storage models. MIT.

cl-data-structures - a portable collection of data structures and algorithms (mainly dicts and sequences, with some statistical functions). BSD.

listopia - a list manipulation library inspired by Haskell’s Data.List. LLGPL.

hash-set - a convenience library implementing hash sets on top of CL hash tables The Unlicense

cl-containers - an extensive library of data structures and utilities - queues, trees, heaps, doubly-linked lists, sets, bags,… MIT

cl-competitive - Common Lisp algorithms collection for competitive programming. Public domain, CCO or MIT.

Accessing data structures:

👍 access - Consistent and nested access to most common data structures. BSD_3Clause.

modf - a setf-like macro for functional programming.

and see more on Quickdocs.

Docker images

docker-sbcl - SBCL Docker images for Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu (amd64, arm64, arm/v7) and Windows. BSD_2Clause.

base-lisp-image - base Docker image for Common Lisp projects with SBCL or CCL and the latest ASDF, Qlot and Roswell.

lisp-devel-docker - Docker images for Lisp development. MIT.

Foreign Function Interface

C

:star: CFFI - Portable, easy-to-use C foreign function interface. Expat.

👍cl-autowrap - Automatically parses header files into CFFI definitions. FreeBSD.

cl-bindgen - A command line tool and library for creating Common Lisp language bindings from C header files. MIT.

cl-gobject-introspection - Gobject Introspection FFI. Automatic bindings to call into the C library. BSD. Generate a lisp interface with gir2cl. LGPL3.

Erlang

CLERIC - a Common Lisp Erlang Interface. An implementation of the Erlang distribution protocol, comparable with erl_interface and jinterface. MIT.

Java

cl+j - A JNI-based interface to a JVM via CFFI. Not available on Quicklisp. Does not reliably work with all implementations. Expat.

Objective-C

objc-lisp-bridge - A portable reader and bridge for interacting with Objective-C and Cocoa. MIT.

Python

burgled-batteries - A bridge between Python and Common Lisp. The goal is that Lisp programs can use Python libraries. Not available on Quicklisp. MIT.

cl4py - The library cl4py (pronounce as clappy) allows Python programs to call Common Lisp libraries. MIT.

py4cl - A library that allows Common Lisp code to access Python libraries. It is basically the inverse of cl4py. MIT.

cl-python - an implementation of Python in Common Lisp. LLGPL.

See also async-process.

.Net Core

Bike - a cross-platform .Net Core interface. MIT.

Miscellaneous

Foil - A foreign object interface; works with the JVM and CLI. Not available on Quicklisp. CPL 1.0.

Game Development

Xelf - Extensible game library. Not available on Quicklisp. GNU LGPL2.1.

Trial - Trial is an OpenGL game engine with a heavy focus on modularity. It is supposed to provide a large toolkit of useful bits and pieces from which you can create a game. Artistic License 2.0.

cl-mpg123 and cl-out123, bindings libraries for libmpg123 and libout123 respectively, giving you fast and easy to use mp3 decoding and cross-platform audio output. Artistic License 2.0.

trivial-gamekit – with this small framework you would be able to make simple 2D games: draw basic geometric forms, images and text, play sounds and listen to mouse and keyboard input.

cl-gamepad - Access to gamepads and joysticks on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Artistic License 2.0.

Graphics

These are libraries for working with graphics, rather than making GUIs (i.e. widget toolkits), which have their own section.

GUI

See also this demo to use Java Swing from ABCL.

Implementations

Proprietary:

LispWorks - an integrated cross-platform development tool for Common Lisp.

Allegro CL - provides the full ANSI Common Lisp standard with many extensions.

MOCL - CL as a library for mobile devices (iOS & Android) and OSX.

JSON

jonathan - A JSON encoder and decoder. MIT.

cl-json - A highly customizable JSON encoder and decoder. Expat.

jsown - A reader and writer for the JSON format. Expat.

json-mop - A metaclass for bridging CLOS and JSON objects. MIT.

cl-json-pointer - A JSON Pointer implementation. MIT.

See also this extensive comparison of JSON libraries.

YAML

cl-yacclyaml - a pure lisp YAML processor (loader, but not yet dumper). GPL3.

cl-yaml - a YAML parser and emitter built on top of libyaml. MIT.

Language extensions

Portability layers

A large list of portability layers is collected here. Here are some of them:

trivial-arguments - A portable library to retrieve the arguments list of a function. Artistic License 2.0.

definitions - a general definitions introspection library. It gives you the ability to retrieve definitions or bindings associated with designators such as symbols, packages, and names in general. Artistic License 2.0.

Changing the syntax

cl21 - An experimental project to move Common Lisp into the 21st century. Expat.

clamp - Arc language’s brevity and conciseness to Common Lisp. Artistic License 2.0.

cl-syntax - Reader syntax conventions. LLGPL.

cl-2dsyntax - An indentation-sensitive reader system. Not available on Quicklisp. Public domain.

cl-annot - Python-like annotations for Common Lisp. LLGPL.

:star: cl-interpol - A set of reader modifications to allow string interpolation. BSD.

pythonic-string-reader - A simple and unobtrusive read table modification inspired by Python’s three quote strings. BSD_3Clause.

cl-reader - A utility library intended at providing reader macros for lambdas, mapping, accessors, hash-tables and hash-sets. MIT.

CLOS extensions

:star: closer-mop - A compatibility layer that rectifies many absent or incorrect MOP features. Expat.

defclass-std - a shortcut macro to write DEFCLASS forms quickly. LLGPL.

specialization-store - generic functions based on types. Simplified BSD License variant.

filtered-functions - enable the use of arbitrary predicates for selecting and applying methods. MIT.

inlined-generic-function - Bringing the speed of Static Dispatch to CLOS. LLGPL.

static-dispatch - allows standard generic function dispatch to be performed statically (at compile time) rather than dynamically (runtime). This is similar to what is known as “overloading” in languages such as C++ and Java. MIT.

dynamic-mixins - simple, dynamic class combination. BSD_2Clause.

fast-generic-functions - Seal your generic functions for an extra boost in performance. MIT.

Function extensions

cl-hooks - Hooks extension point mechanism (as known, e.g., from GNU Emacs). LGPL.

method-hooks - When CLOS method combination allow only one hook per method, this library allows an arbitrary number of them. Mozilla Public Licence.

cl-advice - a portability layer advice library for SBCL, CCL, LispWorks and Allegro. Not in Quicklisp.

Iteration

:star: iterate - An iteration construct for Common Lisp which is extensible and Lispier. MIT.

for - A concise, lispy and extensible iteration macro. Unlike loop it is extensible and sensible, and unlike iterate it does not require code-walking and is easier to extend. Artistic License 2.0.

series - Functional style without any runtime penalty at all. MIT.

gmap - A concise and extensible iteration facility that has the advantage of integrating well with FSet (see the Data Structures section), as it was written by the same author. In Quicklisp as part of misc-extensions . Public domain.

. Public domain. doplus – another extensible iteration library, similar to :for.

snakes - Python style generators for Common Lisp. Includes a port of itertools. Apache2.

Lambda shorthands

fn - a couple of lambda shorthand macros. (fn* (+ _ _)) --> (lambda (_) (+ _ _)) . Public domain.

. Public domain. f-underscore - a tiny library of functional programming utils. (f_ (+ _ _)) -> (lambda (_) (+ _ _)) . Public domain.

. Public domain. cl-punch - Scala-like anonymous lambda literals. (mapcar ^(* 2 _) '(1 2 3 4 5)) . MIT.

See also CL21 and Rutils.

Non-deterministic, logic programming

cl-prolog2 - Common Interface to ISO Prolog implementations from Common Lisp. MIT.

Screamer - augment Common Lisp with practically all of the functionality of both Prolog and constraint logic programming languages. Blog post solving Project Euler puzzles. MIT.

Screamer+ - increasing the expressiveness of SCREAMER. MIT.

Temperance - logic programming. MIT. A focus on performance, with General Game Playing in mind.

Reactive programming

Cells - an implementation of the dataflow programming paradigm, reactive spreadsheet-like expressiveness for CLOS. Used to build an algebra learning system. With documentation. Lisp LGPL.

Contract programming

quid-pro-quo - a contract programming library in the style of Eiffel’s Design by Contract ™. Public domain.

Typing

cl-algebraic-data-type - A library for defining algebraic data types in a similar spirit to Haskell or ML. 3-clause BSD.

👍 trivial-types - provides missing but important type definitions such as proper-list , association-list , property-list and tuple . LLGPL.

, , and . LLGPL. defstar - a collection of macros for easy inclusion of type declarations for arguments in lambda lists. GNU GPL3

Learning and Tutorials

Online

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Let Over Lambda - A book on advanced macro techniques. The first six chapters are available online.

On Lisp - Paul Graham’s amazing book on Lisp macros (and other interesting things).

Programming Algorithms - A comprehensive guide to writing efficient programs with examples in Lisp.

Web Development

Reference

Offline

The CLHS is available offline via an archive and as doc sets in Dash, Zeal and Velocity.

Beginner

Land of Lisp - A fun, game-oriented introduction to Common Lisp.

Practical Common Lisp - A good introductory text to Common Lisp, with practical examples.

Intermediate

ANSI Common Lisp - A thorough, practical covering of the entire language, with exercises. Not recommended as a starter text, due to some caveats.

Common Lisp Recipes - Common Lisp Recipes is a collection of solutions to problems and answers to questions you are likely to encounter when writing real-world applications in Common Lisp. Published in 2015.

Advanced

Community

Library Manager

:star: Quicklisp - A library manager containing many libraries, with easy depencency management. Expat.

Ultralisp - A Quicklisp distribution which updates every 5 minutes and to which one can add his project in one click. BSD.

Quicksys - install systems from multiple Quicklisp distributions. MIT.

👍Roswell - a Lisp implementation installer, script launcher and more. MIT.

qlot - A project-local library installer, similar to Bundler or Carton. Expat.

Quickutil - A utility manager, similar to Quicklisp, but for small utilities rather than whole libraries. 3-clause BSD.

clpm - A package manager for Common Lisp that strives to cleanly separate the package manager process itself from the client image that uses it. BSD_2Clause.

Qi - A package manager with a traditional approach. BSD.

might help:

print-licenses - print licenses used by a project and its dependencies. MIT.

Interfaces to other package managers

linux-packaging - build .deb, .rpm or .pkg packages for your application with a single ASDF declaration. Uses fpm under the hood. MIT.

qldeb - Quicklisp systems to debian packages, along with deb-packager (simply create a debian package by defining an s-expression) and an introductory blog post. Both MIT.

ql-to-deb - Update cl-* debian packages from Quicklisp releases. WTFPL.

dh-quicklisp-buildapp - debhelper utility to let you compile your quicklisp-based Common Lisp code into a buildapp binary in a .deb with almost no effort. MIT.

cl-brewer - Homebrew formula builder for (command line) common lisp applications. Public domain.

See also asdf-sbcl, a plugin for the universal package manager.

Machine Learning

clml - originally developped by Mathematicl Systems Inc., a Japanese company. With a tutorial. LLGPL.

mgl - used by its author to win the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge. MIT.

antik - a foundation for scientific and engineering computation in Common Lisp. GPL. Also mgl-mat and LLA.

Credit: borretti.me’ state of CL ecosystem 2015.

Natural Language Processing

cl-nlp - Natural language processing toolset. Apache2.0.

babel2 - A Fluid Construction Grammar implementation, computational framework, and unification-based grammar formalism Apache2.0.

sparser - A natural language understanding system for English. Eclipse.

Network and Internet

See Cliki for more.

HTTP clients

👍 Dexador - An HTTP client, that aims at replacing Drakma. MIT.

Carrier - A lightweight, async HTTP client built on top of cl-async and fast-http. MIT.

fast-http - A fast HTTP request/response parser for Common Lisp. MIT.

HTTP Servers

👍Clack - A web application environment inspired by Rack and WSGI. LLGPL. Provides a unified interface to a webserver of choice (default is Hunchentoot). With more getting started guide.

:star: Hunchentoot - A web server. 2-clause BSD

zaserve - A portable fork of AllegroServe, by Franz Inc. LLGPL.

wookie - Asynchronous HTTP server. Expat.

woo - A fast non-blocking HTTP server on top of libev. MIT.

cl-http2-protocol - a pure Common Lisp transport agnostic implementation of the HTTP/2 protocol at draft-14. MIT.

Hunchentoot plugins

👍 easy-routes - a routes handling system on top of Hunchentoot. It supports dispatch based on HTTP method, arguments extraction from the url path, decorators, url generation from route name, etc. MIT.

hunchentoot-cgi - a library for executing CGI scripts from the hunchentoot webserver. BSD.

hunchentoot-multi-acceptor - Route multiple domains (virtual hosts) on a single hunchentoot acceptor using a single port. Apache2.0.

hunchentoot-auth - implementing user authentication with passwords. BSD.

hunchentoot-errors - Augments Hunchentoot error pages and logs with request and session information. MIT.

Clack plugins

clack-errors - Error page middleware for Clack. LLGPL.

clath - a single sign-on middleware for Clack. It allows basic login with OAuth1.0a, OAuth2 and OpenID. At the time of writing, it supports authentication from Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, StackExchange, Reddit and Github. Apache2.0.

clack-pretend - a testing and debugging tool for clack. Apache2.0.

hermetic - Security for Clack-based web applications. Expat.

live-reload - Live reload prototype for clack. LLGPL.

clack-static-asset-middleware - a cache-busting static asset middleware for the clack. MIT.

Web frameworks

Caveman - A powerful web framework. LLGPL. Example projects: Quickdocs

hh-web - Framework for building modern web apps. Expat.

ningle - A super-micro web framework. LLGPL. ninglex, an extended and noob-friendly ningle (mostly easier handling of query parameters). MIT.

radiance - A web application environment and framework . Artistic License 2.0.

Lucerne - A minimal web framework built on Clack, inspired by Flask. MIT.

Snooze - A RESTful web framework, built on Clack, where routes are just functions and HTTP conditions are just Lisp conditions. LLGPL.

Weblocks - A widgets-based framework with a built-in ajax update mechanism that “solves the JavaScript problem”. LLGPL.

REST-focused frameworks:

cl-rest-server - a library for writing REST web APIs. Features validation with schemas, annotations for logging, caching, permissions or authentication, documentation via Swagger, etc. MIT.

cl-odata-client - Common Lisp client library for accessing OData services. MIT.

There are more projects, more or less discontinued but interesting. See the other ressources.

Assets management

Rock - an asset manager for Common Lisp. It’s basically a combination of Bower and webassets. MIT.

Parsing html

👍 Plump - A lenient HTML/XML parser, tolerant on malformed markup. Artistic License 2.0. Best used with lquery and clss.

Querying HTML/DOM

See also the XML section below for xpath libraries and more.

HTML generators and templates

👍 spinneret - Common Lisp HTML5 generator. Expat.

flute - An easily composable HTML5 generation library with the most simplistic syntax. MIT.

:star: cl-who - The venerable HTML generator. FreeBSD.

:star: Djula - A port of Django’s template engine to Common Lisp. Expat.

eco - Fast, flexible, designer-friendly template engine. Expat.

TEN - the completness of Djula meets the usability of Eco. MIT.

cl-markup - Modern markup generation library. LLGPL.

cl-closure-template - Implementation of Google’s Closure templates. LLGPL.

clip - An HTML template processor where the templates are written in HTML. Artistic License 2.0.

lsx - Embeddable HTML templating engine with JSX-like syntax. BSD_2Clause.

URI handling

quri - Another URI library for Common Lisp. Supports userinfo, IPv6 hostname, encoding/decoding utilities,… BSD_3Clause.

cl-slug - a small library to make slugs, mainly for URIs, transform in CamelCase, remove accentuation and punctuation, for english and beyound. LLGPL.

Javascript

:star: Parenscript - A translator from Common Lisp to Javascript. 3-clause BSD. See Trident-mode, an Emacs mode that provides live interaction with the browser.unlicence. paren6 - a set of ES6 macros for Parenscript.

parse-js - A package for parsing ECMAScript 3. zlib.

JSCL - A CL-to-JS compiler designed to be self-hosting from day one. Lacks CLOS, format and loop.

CL-JavaScript - A translator from Javascript to Common Lisp. Not available on Quicklisp. Expat.

Wuwei - A toolkit to build Ajax-based web pages. MIT.

SmackJack - An Ajax Common Lisp Library using parenscript to generate javascript and hunchentoot (for now) as the web server. Also allows a server-side lisp function to call a client-side parenscript one. MIT.

Panic, a Parenscript library for React. Not in Quicklisp. MIT. Its TodoMVC example.

remote-js - send JavaScript from Common Lisp to a browser. MIT.

sigil - A Parenscript to Javascript command line compiler and REPL. MIT.

See also trident-mode, an Emacs minor mode for live Parenscript interaction.

Email

trivial-imap - tries to make easy some common cases of working with IMAP servers, like reading emails from the server. A thin wrapper over post-office library (which is a fork of Franz’s cl-imap). BSD.

mailgun - A thin wrapper to post HTML emails through mailgun.com. unlicence.

mito-email-auth - Helper to authenticate a website’s users by sending them unique code by email.

Websockets

👍 usocket - A portable TCP and UDP socket interface. Expat.

websocket-driver - a WebSocket server/client implementation, backend agnostic (Clack). 3-clause BSD.

See more on cliki.

Static site generators

coleslaw and its coleslaw-cli - Flexible Lisp Blogware similar to Frog, Jekyll, or Hakyll. BSD.

Deployment

heroku-buildpack-common-lisp - A Heroku buildpack that uses Roswell to compile Common Lisp applications. LGPL3.

cube - Kubernetes client library for Common LISP generated from the Swagger specification. MIT.

s2i-lisp - Source-to-Image builder image based on CentOS or alternatively RHEL7 for building Common LISP images for OpenShift (and also Docker). It features an up-to-date SBCL with Quicklisp installation, SLIME or SLY integration and allows customization via environment variables. Apache2

deploy - A toolkit for binary deployment of Lisp applications, with extra support for foreign shared libraries. Artistic License 2.0.

cl-aws-runtime-test - An example of using Common Lisp (SBCL) as a custom runtime on AWS lambda. WTFPL.

See also:

Heliohost for a free hosting solution.

Platform.sh has Common Lisp support.

Monitoring

prometheus.cl - Prometheus.io client. Grafana dashboard for SBCL and Hunchentoot metrics (memory, threads, requests per second,…). MIT.

cl-sentry-client - a Sentry client for Common Lisp, the cloud-based error monitoring system. MIT.

Third-party APIs

Others

👍 cl-forms - Web forms handling library for Common lisp. MIT.

maiden - A bot and chat system framework with support for IRC and more. Artistic License 2.0.

css-lite - A CSS grammar. Expat.

find-port - Programmatically find open ports. MIT.

Postmaster - A simple, easy-to-use SMTP/IMAP library. Expat.

cl-selenium-webdriver - a binding library to Selenium 2.0.

Numerical and Scientific

Parallelism and Concurrency

:star: BordeauxThreads - Portable, shared-state concurrency. Expat.

:star: lparallel - A library for parallel programming. 3-clause BSD.

lfarm - distributing work across machines (on top of lparallel and usocket). BSD_3Clause

chanl - Portable, channel-based concurrency. Expat, with parts under 3-clause BSD.

cl-async - A library for general-purpose, non-blocking programming. Expat.

Moira - Monitor and restart background threads. In-lisp process supervisor. MIT.

trivial-monitored-thread - a Common Lisp library offering a way of spawning threads and being informed when one any of them crash and die. MIT.

cl-gearman - a library for the Gearman distributed job system. LLGPL.

swank-crew - distributed computation framework implemented using Swank Client. BSD_3Clause.

cl-coroutine - a coroutine library. It uses the CL-CONT continuations library in its implementation. MIT.

Actors pattern

erlangen - Distributed, asynchronous message passing system for Clozure Common Lisp. GNU GPL3.

Actors package for LispWorks (announce) MIT.

common-lisp-actors - a simple and easy to use Actor system. BSD_2Clause.

memento-mori- a library for writing robust, actor-based systems. It draws inspiration from Erlang/OTP, particularly its crash-first approach to high-availability systems, as well as Akka. MIT.

cl-gserver - an Erlang inspired GenServer. It is meant to encapsulate state, but also to execute async operations. Also with actors. Functionality regarding state is not unsimilar to Clojure’s Agent or cl-actors. MIT.

Event processing

simple-tasks - A very simple task scheduling framework. Artistic License 2.0.

deeds - Deeds is an Extensible Event Delivery System. It allows for efficient event delivery to multiple handlers with a complex event filtering system. Artistic License 2.0.

cl-flow - Data-flowish computation tree library for non-blocking concurrent Common Lisp. MIT.

event-glue - simple eventing abstraction. No dependencies. It can be used anywhere you need a generic event handling system. MIT.

Job processing

SBCL’s timers, system-wide event schedulers.

psychiq - redis-based background job processing for Common Lisp applications. Inspired by Ruby’s Sidekiq and compatible with its web UI. LLGPL.

cl-cron - A simple tool that provides cron like facilities. GPL3.

clerk - a cron-like scheduler with sane DSL. MIT.

Regex

:star: cl-ppcre - Portable, Perl-compatible regular expressions. FreeBSD.

one-more-re-nightmare - a fast-ish regular expression compiler in Common Lisp. BSD_2Clause.

Scripting

Writing, running scripts

👍 Roswell - a lisp installer and scripting environment (helper, launcher, installer) and more. MIT.

cl-all - A script to run Lisp snippets in multiple implementations. This allows you to quickly compare implementation behaviour and differences. Artistic License 2.0.

clawk - an AWK implementation embedded into Common Lisp, to search files for lines and perform specified actions on its fields. BSD-style.

ScriptL - Shell scripting made Lisp-like! Or, live-coding remote function calls for the shell. Write a command in the REPL, and run it instantly in the shell. LLGPL.

Command-line options parsers

👍 Unix-opts - a command line options parser with a concise declaration of options. MIT.

CLON - a Command Line Options Nuker, with lots of options. ISC.

Readline, ncurses and other graphical helpers

cl-readline - a set of functions to edit lines as they are typed in, to maintain a list of previously-entered command lines, to recall and reedit them and perform csh-like history expansion. Emacs and vi editing modes. GPL3.

Linedit - Readline-style library that provides customizable line-editing features. MIT-style.

cl-charms - an interface to libcurses in Common Lisp. It provides both a raw, low-level interface to libcurses via CFFI, and a more higher-level lispier interface. MIT.

in Common Lisp. It provides both a raw, low-level interface to libcurses via CFFI, and a more higher-level lispier interface. MIT. replic - helpers to turn existing code into a readline application, with a focus on defining the completion of the commands’ arguments. Also comes as a ready to use executable, that transforms a user’s lispy init file into readline commands. MIT.

cl-ansi-term - print colorized text, horizontal lines, progress bars, (un)ordered lists and tables on ANSI-compliant terminals. GPL3.

cl-progress-bar - progress bars, just like in Quicklisp ! MIT.

Shells, shells interfaces

shcl - a POSIX-like shell in Common Lisp. Apache2.0.

Shelly - execute Common Lisp functions like a shell command, without the need to write a command line arguments parser. And it also can be used as a Make-like build-tool. FreeBSD.

Clesh - extends Common Lisp to embed shell code in a manner similar to perl’s backtick. FreeBSD.

System administration

Adams - UNIX system administration in Common Lisp. Not unlike Ansible, Chef or Puppet. ISC.

Other scripting utilities

WCL [staled] - allow hundreds of Lisp applications to be realistically available at once, while allowing several of them to run concurrently. WCL accomplishes this by providing Common Lisp as a Unix shared library that can be linked with Lisp and C code to produce efficient applications. For example, the executable for a Lisp version of the canonical Hello World! program requires only 20k bytes on 32 bit x86 Linux. WCL also supports a full development environment, including dynamic file loading and debugging. A modified version of GDB is used to debug WCL programs, providing support for mixed language debugging.

Text Editor Resources

This contains plugins and other goodies for various text editors.

Parinfer - Parinfer is a way to edit lisp code that helps to keep both the indentation and the parenthesis balanced. It is easy to start with and yet it offers advanced features à la Paredit. It is available on many editors (Emacs, Vim, Neovim, Atom, Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, LightTable, CodeMirror,…).

Emacs

:star: Slime - Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs; a full-blown environment for Common Lisp inside of Emacs. Public domain.

👍 Sly - SLY is a fork of SLIME and contains multiple improvements upon it.

👍 Portacle - A portable and multiplatform Common Lisp environment: SBCL, Quicklisp, Emacs, Slime, Git.

cl-devel2 - a Docker container for Common Lisp development environment. Ships SBCL, CCL, Roswell and Emacs25 with Slime.

Vim & Neovim

SLIMV - Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Vim; a full-blown environment for Common Lisp inside of Vim. No license specified.

Vlime - VLIME: Vim plus Lisp Is Mostly Evil. A Common Lisp dev environment for Vim (and Neovim). MIT.

quicklisp.nvim - A Quicklisp frontend for Neovim.

Slimv_box - slimv in a Docker container.

Eclipse

Dandelion - a Common Lisp plugin for the Eclipse IDE.

Lem

Lem - a ready to use, Emacs-like, Slime-based editor tailored for Common Lisp development. With ncurses and Electron interfaces. MIT. See also: an opengl frontend, Lem in Docker, lem-pareto.

Atom

SLIMA allows you to interactively develop Common Lisp code, turning Atom into a pretty good, and actively developped, Lisp IDE. MIT.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text (proprietary) has Common Lisp support with its SublimeREPL and Slyblime packages. Slyblime is an implementation of SLY and it uses the same backend (SLYNK). It ships advanced features including a debugger with stack frame inspection.

VSCode

VSCode-lisp - an extension to support Lisp syntax. It is on GitHub.

Geany (experimental)

Geany-lisp is an experimental lisp mode for the Geany editor.

Notebooks

cl-jupyter - A Common Lisp kernel for Jupyter notebooks custom licence.

common-lisp-jupyter - A Common Lisp kernel for Jupyter along with a library for building Jupyter kernels, based on Maxima-Jupyter by Robert Dodier which was based on cl-jupyter by Frederic Peschanski. MIT.

Darkmatter - A notebook-style Common Lisp environment. MIT.

REPLs

cl-repl - an ipython-like REPL. With completion, shell commands, magic commands, debugger, etc. MIT. With colorthemes.

magic-ed - a tiny editing facility, where you can directly load, edit, manipulate and evaluate file or file content from the REPL, when going to a full IDE is too much. MIT.

Online editors

Judge0 IDE is an online editor which supports Common Lisp (SBCL). MIT.

Apps

CodePlayground - an iPhone and iPad app with Lisp support via CCL.

Text Parsers

cl-yacc - a LALR(1) parser generator. MIT.

cl-shlex - simple lexical analyzer for shell-like syntaxes. MIT.

smug - parser combinators for Common Lisp. SMUG makes it simple to create quick extensible recursive descent parsers without funky syntax or impenetrable macrology. MIT.

Text Processing

montezuma - Full-text indexing and search for Common Lisp. Expat.

mk-string-metrics - Calculate various string metrics efficiently in Common Lisp (Damerau-Levenshtein, Hamming, Jaro, Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, etc). MIT.

wiki-lang-detect - Text language identification using Wikipedia data. No license specified.

These are applications or bits of code that make development in Common Lisp easier without being Common Lisp libraries themselves.

quickapp - A project for generating template projects with SBCL and buildapp. Also includes a command-line argparser. 3-clause BSD.

quickapp-cli - quickapp as a command-line utility. 3-clause BSD.

quicksearch - Look up online libraries from the REPL. Expat.

cl-project - General modern project skeletons. LLGPL.

lake - a GNU make like build utility. MIT.

Unit Testing

Utilities

Caching

clache - General caching facility. LLGPL.

Configuration

👍 py-configparser - reads and writes Python’s ConfigParser-like configuration files. MIT.

envy - Configuration switcher. FreeBSD.

chameleon - a configuration management library shipped with profile support. MIT.

CSV

:star: cl-csv - A library for parsing CSV files. 3-clause BSD.

cl-decimals - Decimal number parser and formatter. Public domain.

auto-text - automatic (encoding, end of line, column width, csv delimiter etc) detection for text files. MIT. See also inquisitor for detection of asian and far eastern languages.

localtime - A development library for manipulating date and time information in a semi-standard manner. 3-clause BSD.

cl-date-time-parser - Parse date-time-string, liberally. Hides the difference between date-time formats, and enables to manage date and time as the one date-time format. MIT.

chronicity - A natural language date and time parse, to parse strings like “3 days from now”. BSD_3Clause.

local-time-duration - Duration processing library built on top of local-time. MIT.

iso-8601-date - Miscellaneous date routines in Common Lisp, based around the ISO 8601 string representation. LLGPL.

calendar-date - a Gregorian calendar date library. MIT.

periods - manipulating date/time objects at a higher level. With series-compatible data structure. BSD_3Clause.

Data validation

ratify - A collection of utilities to ratify, validate and parse inputs. Artistic License 2.0.

clavier - General purpose validation library for Common Lisp. MIT.

json-schema - A library for validating data against schemas of drafts 4, 6, 7, and 2019-09 of the JSON Schema standard. LLGPL.

sanity-clause - a data serialization/contract library for Common Lisp. Schemas can be property lists or class-based, allowing to check slots’ types during make-instance . LLGPL.

Developer utilities

repl-utilities - Ease common tasks at the REPL (print documentation, print external symbols, call hooks when loading a package,…). BSD_2Clause.

flight-recorder - a robust REPL history facility.

tracer - tracing profiler for Common Lisp, with output suitable for display in Chrome’s/Chromium’s Tracing Viewer. MIT.

cl-flamegraph - A wrapper around SBCL’s statistical profiler, to generate FlameGraph charts for Common Lisp programs. BSD.

cl-debug - a cross-package debug facility. Provides a unified way to enable or disable debug-specific code. Debugging code can be enabled or disabled relative to program features denoted by either a symbol or a keyword. ISC licence.

supertrace - Superior Common Lisp trace functionality for debugging/profiling. Trace many functions at once, use before and after hooks. BSD_2Clause.

functionality for debugging/profiling. Trace many functions at once, use before and after hooks. BSD_2Clause. GTFL - A graphical terminal for Lisp, meant for Lisp programmers who want to debug or visualize their own algorithms. A graphical trace in the browser. BSD-style.

trivial-with-current-source-from - Helps macro writers produce better errors for macro users. GPL3.

Documentation builders

sphinxcontrib-cldomain - Extending Sphinx to cover Common Lisp. To build documentation with the same ease as sphinx would a Python project. GPL3

Codex - A beautiful documentation system for Common Lisp. MIT.

Staple - a tool to generate documentation pages using an HTML template. Uses the existing README, adds docstrings, crossreferences and links to the CLHS. ArtisticLicense2.0.

cl-bibtex - A compatible re-implementation of the BibTeX program in Common Lisp, with a BST-to-CL compiler. GNU LGPL2.1.

mgl-pax - Exploratory programming environment and documentation generator. one may accomplish similar effects as with Literate Programming, but documentation is generated from code, not vice versa. Code is first, code must look pretty, documentation is code. MIT.

erudite - Literate Programming System built with interactive development in mind. MIT.

Files and directories

:star: uiop and its pathname package (replaces cl-fad). uiop is part of ASDF3 and as thus is shipped in many implementations. MIT.

package (replaces cl-fad). uiop is part of ASDF3 and as thus is shipped in many implementations. MIT. osicat - A lightweight operating system interface on POSIX-like systems (directory iteration and deletion, environment variables, file permissions, etc) Expat.

pathname-utils - A collection of utilities to help with pathname operations. Artistic License 2.0.

ppath - Common Lisp’s implementation of the Python’s os.path module. BSD.

archive - a library for reading and creating archive (tar, cpio) files. BSD_3Clause. A pure Common Lisp replacement for the ‘tar’ program.

mmap - Portable mmap file memory mapping utility library. zlib.

File watching libraries:

cl-inotify - interface to the Linux inotify API. Simplified BSD License.

cl-fswatch - an CFFI wrapper of fswatch, a cross-platform file change monitor. ISC.

Git

legit - an interface to the Git binary. Artistic License 2.0.

git-api - Common Lisp library to access git repository. It doesn’t need git or libgit installed. BSD.

i18n

Linting, code formatting

sblint - a linter for Common Lisp source code using SBCL, suited for Reviewdog (slides). BSD_2Clause.

trivial-formatter - code formatter for Common Lisp. MIT.

Logging

:star: log4cl - Logging framework modelled after Log4J. Apache2.0. Advanced integration with Slime. log4cl-json - JSON appender extension. BSD.

verbose - A fast and highly configurable logging framework. Artistic License 2.0.

a-cl-logger - Logging library providing context sensitive logging of more than just strings to more than just local files or output streams. Features logstash support, json support, logger hierarchies, context sensitive logging, objects printed as an inspectable presentation,…

To third parties:

cl-fluent-logger - A Common Lisp structured logger for Fluentd.

See also: extensive comparison of logging libraries.

Markdown

3bmd - a markdown -> html converter. MIT.

PDF

cl-typesetting and cl-pdf - cross-platform Common Lisp libraries for generating PDF files. FreeBSD.

cl-pslib - a (thin) wrapper around the pslib library for generating PostScript files. Also cl-pslib-barcode. LLGPL.

Plotting

vgplot - an interface to the gnuplot plotting utility with the intention to resemble some of the plot commands of octave or matlab. GPL3.

eazy-gnuplot - a lispy, structure-less Gnuplot library. With its cookbook. LLGPL

kai - A high-level plotter library for Common Lisp. A wrapper around the Plotly JS library. MIT.

cl-spark - sparkline strings for the console: (spark '(1 1 2 3 5 8)) => “▁▁▂▃▅▇”. MIT.

Security

cl-isolated - A restricted environment for Common Lisp code evaluation AGPL-3.0.

Other

This contains anything which doesn’t fit into another category.

XML

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please submit a pull request or create an issue to add a new framework, library or software to the list.

The rules we (try to) respect are the followings: