What is the best Scheme or LISP implementation for OS X?

Question

I am looking for a version of Scheme or even LISP that I can use to recover some lost Lisp development skills. Some web capabilities would be nice but not essential.

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Answer 1

I'd go with Racket. It may not be as fast as SBCL, but it does have excellent libraries and documentation, as well as an integrated environment that's designed to get you developing and running Scheme programs right out of the gate. What I really like about Racket's IDE, DrRacket, is what you don't have to do—you don't have to learn Emacs, you don't have to learn SLIME, you don't have to worry about hunting down third-party libraries, as virtually all libraries meant for Racket can be found in packages. All in all, it really cuts down on the learning curve and allows you to focus on the actual task at hand: writing great code.

Also, it comes with a web server if you want to make Racket-powered websites (which I'm currently looking into).

Answer 2

I haven't used it myself, but Steel Bank Common Lisp has received some favourable buzz over at reddit. It's open source and free so the price is right for some hobby programming.

In the past, I've had GNU Common Lisp running on my macbook pro.

Answer 3

If you're just hobby programming, LispWorks has a free, personal version which is quite powerful and sophisticated. It's biggest issue is a run time limit of several hours. So, you won't be writing any long running servers in it, but that doesn't mean it's not a useful tool.

CLISP runs on most everything, and is quite nice actually, it just doesn't do threads. (Important if you want to write an actual server, but as PHP and Perl have shown us, Apache + [insert language] is a very viable platform.)