LispWorks is 'relatively' popular for Lisp-based music applications like Open Music, om#, Scorecloud, OpusModus and a few others, because the native GUI toolkit for Windows, Linux and macOS allows to write portable GUI applications. One pays for being able to use a niche language able to write such applications.
I'm aware, but I use *BSD on my computers and can't afford to pay for a FreeBSD LW license to compile something from source myself, so I'm shit outta luck. I am aware that the reason why it uses LispWorks is for the GUI toolkit, which is an understandable reason to since there isn't currently a real free software alternative to CAPI unless one wants to be reliant on Qt or GTK (neither of which are native to MacOS or Windows obviously). maybe one day if McCLIM gets better support for backends other than X11 there will be a real alternative, but even then, from digging into Open Music's source code it would be an absolutely massive undertaking to try to rewrite it to not be dependent on LW and it probably is the same for other CL composition software that uses LW.
https://github.com/openmusic-project/openmusic/releases/tag/...
LispWorks is 'relatively' popular for Lisp-based music applications like Open Music, om#, Scorecloud, OpusModus and a few others, because the native GUI toolkit for Windows, Linux and macOS allows to write portable GUI applications. One pays for being able to use a niche language able to write such applications.