LispWorks 6.0 Personal Edition is out ...

http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html

by vmmenon • 16 years ago

38 25 16 years ago

blue12• 16 years ago

...and you have to get the enterprise edition (+2400€) if you want the luxury of 64-bit.

LispWorks and Franz are both expensive because they offer very good support and have some very talented staff that need to get paid.

The free SBCL and Clozure CL systems are very good also, and free support from the developers can be good: one customer project using SBCL 4 years ago hit a snag running on a 64 GB server and one of the developers sent me a patch in a few hours. Excellent!

blue12• 16 years ago

I don't doubt the quality of LW, I just doubt that 64bit can be considered an optional feature these days.

tomjen33• 16 years ago

Still cheaper than a single license for a single developer for a single platform for QT.

hmm, Lisp or C++.

monk_the_dog2• 16 years ago

QT is LGPL these days.

mark_l_watson2• 16 years ago

I just downloaded the non-commercial version and tried it out. The interface does not seem to have changed very much over the years, but it has always been nice.

I bought Linux, Windows, and Mac LispWorks professional licenses about 8 or 9 years ago. One very nice thing about LispWorks is that the utility to make standalone applications has a "tree shaker" to toss unused code so executables can be reasonably small (compared to SBCL where a standalone app is about 30 MB minimm or Clozure CL where a standalone app is around 20MB minimum).

I always thought that the tree shaker was the really big win for LispWorks.

Now, when I want to use a Lisp to create small standalone applications I use Gambit-C Scheme.

BTW, about 10 years ago, I was paid a fee to work on the LispWorks documentation - but that does not bias my opinion.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

Interesting.

I remember Actor (an Algol-ish syntax flavor of Smalltalk that ran on Windows 3) had a similar thing to trim the image file prior to packing up the runtime. It removed everything that whatever your app was didn't depend on.

monk_the_dog2• 16 years ago

I learned to program with Actor. God I loved programming in that environment.

Why the heck did Symantec buy the whitewater group if they were just going to kill the damn thing!

loewenskind2• 16 years ago

Dolphin Smalltalk had (has?) this as well.

whyenot• 16 years ago

This looks wonderful, especially the polishing they have been doing to the IDE. Unfortunately, it's also way outside of my price range.

gjm11• 16 years ago

The Personal Edition isn't -- it's free (but crippled by heapsize and runtime limitations, and some missing features, so you have an incentive to buy one of the payware versions).

stuhacking• 16 years ago

It seems to me that the main hooks of Allegro and Lispworks are things like modern UI bindings, really solid database integration, modelling tools and stand alone applications... but these are the features excluded from the trials.

microtonal• 16 years ago

IMO it would depend on what you do. If well-rounded libraries and a good IDE would make you far more productive than a free or less expensive product, then it is probably worth the admission price.

We use a proprietary Prolog interpreter (SICStus), but it comes with very good support and it has some advantages over open source interpreters that matter to us. Plus they provide continuing support/maintenance for their previous major version.

gibsonf1• 16 years ago

I bought Lispworks Professional several years ago, but now only use SBCL - why pay when you can have such a powerful and robust system for free.

loewenskind2• 16 years ago

Depends on what the paid option offers, of course. In the case of Lispworks it has (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread) a "tree shaker" that makes building stand alone apps a lot nicer than SBCL. It also has a superior debugger. I'm sure there is more but these are what stood out to me when I evaluated it (I currently use SBCL almost exclusively, but I can see why someone would pay for Lispworks).

sgt• 16 years ago

I've used one great app that is written with LispWorks. It's called Prime Trader and is the brain child of Espen Vestre at Netfonds.no

I see they are listing it as one of their success stories: http://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/netfonds-primetrade...

LispWorks 6.0 Personal Edition is out ...

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