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Dax Fohl
Dax Fohl

Reputation: 10781

Are there any fairly mature Lisp/Scheme/Clojure compilers for .Net CLR?

I am seeing several variants out there; ClojureCLR, LSharp, IronScheme, IronLisp, among others. Are any of these actively maintained and/or anywhere close to "mature", or are they mostly experiments or dust-gatherers? Which would be considered the most mature framework for compiling to .Net dll's and referencing other .Net dll's, if any? Does any integrate well with Visual Studio a la at least a "Create Lisp Project" feature?

Upvotes: 20

Views: 1910

Answers (4)

ffriend
ffriend

Reputation: 28482

IronLisp is dead and superseded by IronScheme, which in turn is still beta.

L Sharp and ClojureCLR are similar and they follow same idea of modern Lisp for CLR (in contrast to IronScheme, which tries to just implement the R6RS standard on the new platform). ClojureCLR seems to be more popular than L Sharp, and Java's Clojure community is growing up quickly, so you can use many of its libraries in your .NET application.

I know that for ClojureCLR there is a VS2010 plugin available.

I believe, ClojureCLR now is the most intensively developed, so I would bet on it. On other hand, Clojure (and so ClojureCLR) still changes, and future versions of it may differ a lot from current state, which is not very good for long term production project. From this point IronScheme, which implements old verified R6RS, is more preferable. I can't say a lot of L#, but I guess it is somewhere between ClojureCLR and IronScheme.

So, actual decision depends on your personal needs: stability, size of a (potential) project, and, of course, language features - don't forget to learn a bit about all of three.

Upvotes: 14

Larry Coleman
Larry Coleman

Reputation: 202

If you just need to call .NET from Lisp, and you don't need to create DLL's1, RDNZL may work for you.

1I'm not saying that you can't create DLL's with RDNZL and your Lisp implementation, I just haven't had any reason to try to do it.

Upvotes: 0

erjiang
erjiang

Reputation: 45657

Don't forget Bigloo, which is a well-known Scheme compiler to C and the Java VM, and recently added an experimental .NET bytecode compiler.

Upvotes: 0

SK-logic
SK-logic

Reputation: 9714

There is one (non-standard) Lisp compiler for .NET with an emphasis on .NET interoperability:

http://www.meta-alternative.net/mbase.html

It's the most feature-rich of all the listed, but it keeps changing and it's still in beta stage.

Upvotes: 0

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