Shen for Common Lisp

Shen for Common Lisp by Mark Tarver, with contributions by the Shen Language Open Source Community.

This codebase currently supports the following implementations:

• GNU CLisp
• Clozure Common Lisp
• Embeddable Common Lisp
• Steel Bank Common Lisp

This port acts as the standard implementation of the Shen language. It is also the fastest known port, running the standard test suite in 4-8 seconds on SBCL, depending on hardware.

Bug reports, fixes and enhancements are welcome. If you intend to port Shen to another variety of Common Lisp, consider doing so as a pull request to this repo.

Features

Documentation of native interop functions is in INTEROP.md. These functions allow calling into Lisp from Shen and Shen from Lisp.

Also included is the function cl.exit, which takes an exit code, terminates the process, returning the given exit code.

Prerequisites

See PREREQUISITES.md for information on what tools you will need installed to build and work on shen-cl.

Downloading

Pre-built binaries of the SBCL port are available on the releases page. Just make sure the executable is in your PATH.

There is also a Homebrew formula for the SBCL build. It can be run like so:

brew install Shen-Language/homebrew-shen/shen-sbcl

Building

The Makefile automates all build and test operations.

X can be clisp, ccl, ecl, sbcl or it can be all, which will run the command for all of the preceding.

precompile is only required when bootstraping Shen/CL from this repository, the source release includes the precompiled files. The SHEN variable has to be defined and point to a working Shen executable that will be used to precompile the kernel and compiler code.

Building from a precompiled sources release

The precompiled source relases (shen-cl-vX.Y.Z-sources.{tar.gz,zip}) contain all the .lsp files required to build a working Shen executable (precompiled from .shen sources). To do so, run the build-X make target:

# Produces an executable in bin/sbcl/shen
make build-sbcl
# Runs the created executable
make run-sbcl

Running

An executable is generated for each platform in its platform-specific output directory under bin/ (e.g. bin/sbcl/shen.exe). Per typical naming conventions, it is named shen.exe on Windows systems and just shen on Unix-based systems.

Running shen --help shows a full listing of command-line options:

When starting Shen via make, command line arguments can be passed through like this: make run-sbcl Args="eval -l init.shen -e (run)".

Releasing

Archives of pre-built binaries are created using the make release command. They will appear under release/, named with the operating system and current git tag or short commit hash.

Currently, only the license file and the SBCL build are included (named shen[.exe]).

Each tagged release on the project downloads page should have a set of pre-built archives. Be sure to archive the build of that specific commit, like this:

make pure
git checkout v3.0.3
make fetch
make precompile SHEN=shen-sbcl
make sbcl
make release