What is the current state of affairs with regard to Common Lisp on Windows?
I remember that when I was last trying to explore it, that was the single biggest hurdle - all the recommended freely available "industrial strength" implementations (SBCL, CMUCL) were either unavailable on Windows outright, or considered experimental and highly unstable there. The stuff that was available was either proprietary (and costly), or its performance was not deemed sufficient for production use (e.g. CLisp).
But that was several years ago. Did anything change?
I use CCL on Windows, and at times SBCL. SBCL does have a large warning about lack of maintenance and potential instability or something like that, but I haven't used it heavily enough to expose such behavior.
CCL has no interpreter, so any code you write gets compiled to native code. People worry too much about performance too prematurely in my opinion.
I hate windows in general and try to avoid using it and targeting it whenever I can, but for the past year I did use windows+ccl+emacs to successfully get work done, which I was able to easily transition back over to macos+ccl+emacs just recently.
I would say that at the very least, the hurdles you ran into in the past are gone. Binaries for sbcl on windows are supplied, and I'm pretty sure that threading is enabled in recent builds so no need to recompile yourself (I remember wasting so much time on this a few years ago and moved to ccl).
I recently ran into a workflow that ccl easily accommodated that sbcl didn't, which was specifically such that when you ran out of heap, ccl automatically allocated more, whereas with sbcl it seems to be fixed upon startup and requires more than a command line flag to fix (I couldn't figure it out in the hour or so I spent working on it)
Clozure looks very interesting, thank you! Got it up and running in a few minutes, and the docs look promising. I think it wasn't around last time I tried to seriously explore CL. Good to see more options!
It is a lot better, I don't think SBCL gets the "kitty of doom" start up message anymore. I'd love it if you'd try and let us know :-) (or you could just ask on #lisp). I know for a fact that Clozure CL works well on Windows.
I remember that when I was last trying to explore it, that was the single biggest hurdle - all the recommended freely available "industrial strength" implementations (SBCL, CMUCL) were either unavailable on Windows outright, or considered experimental and highly unstable there. The stuff that was available was either proprietary (and costly), or its performance was not deemed sufficient for production use (e.g. CLisp).
But that was several years ago. Did anything change?