Why another lisp implementation?
Well, you must be joking. Compared to other worlds, such as the Scheme area, the number of implementations of Common-Lisp is rather small. In any case, ECL has several nice features which make it extremely valuable: • It is small. The library is about 1Mb and makes extensive use of the capabilities of your C/C++ environment, thereby reusing a lot of code. • It is extremely portable. It does not rely on knowledge of binary file formats and other things which make maintainance very complicated. • It interacts very well with the C/C++ world. ECL can be embedded as an extension language in C/C++ applications. Furthermore, it provides a lisp-to-C/C++ translator, and you can inline C/C++ code in your lisp code. • It provides efficient interpreted code. ECL features a rather small, but rather fast bytecodes compiler and interpreter.
