Many years ago, I worked as a consultant on a medical AI project and my customer paid a fair amount …

The commercial aspect is not a problem in my opinion (but again english is not my main language so I might have conveyed the wrong tone). The issue is the pricing model which may work for established company ready to invest money from the start, but is simply out of touch with independant developers and small companies exploring the possibility of using Common Lisp. Open sourcing Lispworks and selling support contracts and an enterprise version (with CAPI, CORBA, etc.) would make more sense. The world has changed: all other languages have open source implementations; most servers are open source, most databases too. It is hard to convince a company to use Common Lisp, but even harder to justify paying for a proprietary implementation. And for me personnally, Lispworks would force me to buy two licenses (Linux and FreeBSD) for personal use, and two for my solo company. It simply does not …

> I always like seeing Common Lisp links, but personally I was a bit put off by the very strong anti-commercial comments about LispWorks and Franz. What? I found it informative - clear and to the point about what frustrations you can expect with the licenses. I mean, FCOL, he even made the effort to search google for the cost of the licenses because Franz hides them. What exactly in the following texts do you describe as "strong anti-commercial comments"? ------------------------------------------------------ > Moving to proprietary implementations; Lispworks has been around for more than 30 years and the company producing it still release new versions on a regular basis. > While Lispworks supports most features you would expect from a commercial product (native compiler, multithreading, FFI, GUI library, various graphical tools, a Prolog implementation…), it is hampered by its licensing…

He's right, though. If I'm a somewhat polyglot developer ambivalent to any language out there, why would I pay those licensing costs when I can just go elsewhere instead? That's what regular devs do, they don't even bother writing articles or commenting on HN :-)

> Small standalone executables with a tree shaker How small? Are they static and hassle-free like Go/Rust binaries? > you can also make small standalone apps with SBCL Same question. Also what's the downside? Slower run-time?

I am convinced that Lispworks is a great product. From what I can see it comes with a nice IDE and some nice libraries. I would have loved to give it a try, but unfortunately I was never able to do do so. And that is where the critique of the licensing scheme comes from. I am sure there are quite a few professionals for whom Lispworks has great value and the license costs are just a non-issue. But despite being a professional Lisp programmer for more than 15 years, I never came close to licensing Lispworks. Nor in the 20 years of being a Lisp enthusiast. As an enthusiast, I would be happy to spend a few hundred € for private usage, but not thousands. I would like to be able to really evaluate the product before spending a significant amount of money on it, but with the limits of the personal edition, it immediately quit on the first attempt of starting my back-then tiny hobby project. Do…

Yeah, I totally agree. I only use Lisp as a hobby so I stick to the free implementations, but if I made money with it I definitely wouldn't mind paying for LispWorks or Allegro. An $8k license fee really isn't that much for enterprise software.

Heh, if you thought this post had very strong comments about LispWorks and Franz, wait till you read my rant from last year: https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_... It doesn't bother me as much as maybe it seems from the rant, I don't think about them hardly at all. But when I do, it's frustrating, because just about every other ecosystem out there is better. The rant highlights IntelliJ from the Java world as an alternative. Somehow, JetBrains is able to cater to individual developers and incredibly giant enterprises just fine. They care about their IDE and associated software. LispWorks and Franz do not, to the same degree. That's fine, it's their businesses, but it's disappointing when you want to see Lisp succeed and you have two great proprietary IDEs and implementations that are effectively untouchable for a huge portion of Lispers and would-be-Lispers.

SBCL's save-lisp-and-die is my all time favourite function name. It's so unintentionally melodramatic :)