February 24, 2026
Parentheses and plot twists
Steel Bank Common Lisp
Old-school Lisp rises again and the crowd asks: is it 1999 or the future
TLDR: SBCL, a fast open-source Common Lisp toolset, sparked a lively throwback vs. future debate. Commenters joked about its age, argued over tooling and alternatives, and even claimed Hacker News got faster after a move to SBCL—proof that old tech can still stir passions and power big systems
The SBCL announcement lit up the comments with a perfect split-screen of nostalgia and snark. One user begged for a “(1999)” timestamp, poking the idea that Common Lisp—an older language famous for lots of parentheses—should come with a vintage label. Another curtly shot back, “What about it?” Meanwhile, the crowd chuckled at the name lore: Steel. Bank. Descended from Carnegie Mellon’s build, and apparently cooler when whispered like a movie trailer. For the uninitiated: SBCL is a fast, free compiler for Common Lisp, packed with a debugger, profiler, coverage tool, and more, running on Linux, macOS, Windows, and friends—basically, your laptop and that vintage workstation your uncle swears still boots.
Then came the spicy history drop: an older user claimed HN’s Arc (the homegrown language behind Hacker News) was slow before a switch to SBCL last year, allegedly making mega-threads fly. Cue raised eyebrows. Others waved the “don’t forget the rest” flag, shouting out commercial heavyweights LispWorks and Allegro and warning that the SBCL + Emacs cult leads to tooling whines. There’s even a contrast with ECL, the “Embeddable Common Lisp,” for people who want Lisp in smaller places. The vibe: half museum tour, half comeback concert, with jokes, lore, and a real debate over whether this retro rocket still leaves modern tools in the dust
Key Points
- •SBCL is a high-performance, open-source compiler and runtime for ANSI Common Lisp under a permissive license.
- •It includes an interactive environment with tools such as a debugger, statistical profiler, and code coverage.
- •SBCL supports multiple operating systems: Linux, various BSDs, macOS, Solaris, and Windows.
- •Documentation is available online (HTML/PDF) and as TeXInfo source in the source tree’s doc/manual directory.
- •Bugs can be reported via Launchpad or by emailing the SourceForge-hosted sbcl-bugs mailing list without subscription.