Corman Lisp

This is the open-source source release of Corman Lisp. The canonical
home of this release is https://github.com/sharplispers/cormanlisp.

From the Corman Lisp 'Features' page:

Corman Lisp is a Common Lisp development environment for Microsoft Windows operating systems running on Intel platforms. Corman Lisp consists of a Common Lisp native code compiler for Intel processors, 80x86 assembler and disassembler, incremental linker and multi-window text editor. It requires a system running a Microsoft Windows operating system (such as Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME or Windows NT). It is fully integrated with the Win32 API, and all the Windows API functions are readily available from Lisp.

Corman Lisp incorporates state-of-the-art compiler technology to bring you a Common Lisp system unmatched on Windows platforms.

Corman Lisp works on Windows XP SP3 and newer. It is also reported to work on Linux via Wine.

Source release history

In June 2013, Zach Beane contacted Roger Corman about the future of
Corman Lisp. Roger replied:

Hi Zach,

Thanks for your interest in Corman Lisp. I have been unable to
commit any resources to developing Corman Lisp for the last couple
of years. I would be willing to convert it to open source, and let
others take it over, as I don't expect to be able to get back to
it any time soon. [...]

I see two primary issues at this point. First, the Corman Lisp
kernel needs to be built with Visual Studio 2005, which is an old
version of VS. At one point I built it with VS2008 and it built
and ran, but some problem with the FFI caused applications saved,
and the IDE, to have problems. This type of thing is fairly common
as Microsoft makes subtle changes to the code generation of their
C compiler, which in turn affects the Lisp kernel which has very
tight rules about how it expects its code to look. I did a lot to
reduce the kernel (move things from the kernel to Lisp code, which
is then compiled safely), but did not fully resolve the VS 2008
issues. Now there is VS 2010 and 2012, and I never tried building
with either of those. In general I find each newer version of VS
is worse for native C/C++ debugging, as .NET has become
Microsoft's primary platform for new software.

The other issue is running on 64-bit OS. Again, the FFI misbehaves
when you have saved an application, or just doing a bunch of FFI
stuff in an application. It is something to do with GC and the
64-bit support for running 32-bit applications (which is what CL
is). It could be related to the same issue as I encountered with
building under VS2008.

Tracking down this problem is difficult.

Regarding converting to a full 64-bit Lisp, this would be a much
bigger effort. Corman Lisp gets such good performance by a large
amount of hand-optimized x86 assembly code. This would all have to
be rewritten/replaced in a 64-bit Lisp.

When Corman Lisp was first developed in the late 90s, there was
really no competition on Windows platforms. Franz only had a
16-bit Lisp they were selling, and not really taking the Windows
market seriously. Mac Common Lisp was on 680x0 and later PowerPC
but didn't get to Windows for a very long time, and LispWorks
didn't support Windows until much later. Now I think most all of
those have good implementations on Windows (though only MCL is
free). I have used Allegro extensively for a large contract with
SRI and I see the value of a mature cross-platform system like
they have. It is however extremely expensive, and developing
applications for distribution requires lots of negotiation and
per-license payments to Franz. Corman Lisp still has some
advantages, I think--it is really a good hackers Lisp, when you
want to easily get down into the assembly level, or in the guts of
the compiler, to do almost anything. You have the power of Lisp to
do those things with macros and a nice high-level dynamic
environment.

I definitely want to see it live on, so am open to whatever
enables that. I don't currently derive any significant income from
it so that's not a concern for me.

In January 2015, Roger Corman agreed to release the Corman Lisp
sources under the MIT license. He added:

Going forward with the code, I would probably say that the first
step is getting the kernel (Corman Lisp server) to compile using a
new version of MS Visual Studio (such as VS2012 or VS2013)--it was
last compiled with VS2005. I tried at one point to get it to build
with VS2008 (and I think the project files are still there) but
ran into some bugs and didn't resolve them.

Getting the kernel to compile properly and the GC and FFI to work
properly is tricky. The kernel is very sensitive to the generated
code, and you pretty much have to disable all optimizations (since
the GC depends on things like proper stack frames and the various
code patterns when it is looking for references). The Makefiles
and project files should have the settings set correctly (for
VS2005) but newer compiler versions try to add new sophisticated
optimizations, which then causes new issues.

Turning off optimizations shouldn't really negatively affect
performance, as most of the kernel code gets replaced by compiled
Lisp code during the build process. Some functions don't, however
(the kernel code generator, for instance) and these are probably
the source of the compiled code sensitivity.

Roger provided the source code for Corman Lisp to Zach, who updated
the license information and posted the code to github.

N.B.

The problem which was reported by Roger was resolved. Current versions
of Corman Lisp support modern, 64-bit versions of Windows.

Support

This source release of Corman Lisp is not officially supported,
commercially or otherwise. For discussion of this source release of
Corman Lisp, see the unofficial Corman Lisp mailing
list.

License Information

Nearly all of the code is originally by Roger Corman. There are some
contributions from Vassili Bykov and Reini Urban. With their explicit
consent, their code is available under the MIT license:

  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
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  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
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  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
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  NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
  LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
  OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
  WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Some code is provided by Chris Double. It is available under the
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  Copyright (C) 1995-2005 Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler

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