Awesome

asdf-sbcl

Steel Bank Common Lisp plugin for asdf-vm version manager.

You're honestly probably better served loading it from your local package manager. Unless you need the linkable runtime or cryptography, just use your package manager.

This plugin installs SBCL from source. Depending on the speed of your system, this can take some time. In return, it will give you the flexibility to run and manage different versions of SBCL with configurable build options. This will liberate you from the tyranny of outdated official packages or missing compile-time flags that you might need.

SBCL is compiled using itself, or any other Common Lisp. I would love to use a publicly available older SBCL version to bootstrap the new one like I have done for years, and as I still do for Linux, but on MacOS Ventura the old builds don't run anymore due to mmap errors. To deal with that, I now use ecl for mac builds which is an embeddable common lisp that is widely available via package managers, though quite slow.

I have chosen a few useful options by default to make it easier to generate compressed images of multithreaded apps that make use of external libraries and crypto (mostly so you can generate small binaries that use openssl out of the box):

• --with-sb-core-compression for creating compressable images
• --with-sb-thread for threading
• --with-sb-linkable-runtime for linking outside libs like openssl
• --with-sb-rotate-byte for cryptography and hashing

All versions from 2.1.2 to 2.1.11 have a patch applied to allow the linking of external libs on M1 macs. To the best of my knowledge, versions >= 2.2.0 on no longer require the patch.

--with-sb-core-compression relies on zstd for compression in the latest versions of SBCL. You will need to make sure you have zstd installed via your favorite package manager and make sure your CPATH and LIBRARY_PATH point to them. If you're on a mac, you also need to have your command line tools in your path in your ~/.zshrc. For example, if you're using brew on an M1 or M2 mac, install zstd with brew install zstd and then install sbcl with LIBRARY_PATH=$(brew --prefix)/lib CPATH=$(brew --prefix)/include asdf install sbcl 2.4.9. Be sure to thank Apple for this hellscape. If you're using asdf, install zstd with sudo apt-get install libzstd-dev and let it rip. Other distros will need to install it in whatever way they usually install.

Requirements

• jq
• curl
• libzstd-dev
• [zlib] on macs
• ecl on macs

Install Plugin

asdf plugin-add sbcl https://github.com/smashedtoatoms/asdf-sbcl.git

Asdf-vm Usage

List candidate SBCLs:

asdf list-all sbcl

Install a candidate listed from the previous command like this:

asdf install sbcl 2.4.9

On Macs, the installer can screw up because it can't find zlib, despite it being installed. You will get an error that says something like fatal error: 'zstd.h' file not found. If that happens, and you have libz installed via brew, try installing like this:

LIBRARY_PATH=$(brew --prefix)/lib CPATH=$(brew --prefix)/include asdf install sbcl 2.4.9

Select an installed candidate for use like this:

asdf global sbcl 2.4.9

Custom compile flags

The default install will use --with-sb-core-compression --with-sb-thread --with-sb-linkable-runtime --with-sb-rotate-byte. If you want different compile-time flags, you can set them by using the following syntax on install:

SBCL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="--with-sb-core-compression --with-sb-thread" \
asdf install sbcl 2.3.9