Project:Common Lisp/Guide

Implementations
One of the great things about Common Lisp is the variety of quality implementations available. Gentoo Linux supports the following free software implementations:

Libraries
As of writing, there are over two-hundred Common Lisp libraries supported in Gentoo Linux. All Common Lisp libraries in Gentoo are made available within the dev-lisp category in the Gentoo repository and the dev-lisp category in the lisp overlay

Using Common Lisp
Create a Gentoo Common Lisp initialization file somewhere in your home directory. You might call the file perhaps. You could include this initialization code directly in your Lisp implementation's initialization file (eg., , etc.), but it will make more sense to include it from an external file if you work with more than one implementation. The first thing our initialization code must do is load ASDF:

If the implementation includes ASDF then you may need to load it using the implementation a specific REQUIRE. If the implementation doesn't include ASDF then we load it directly. The next step is to configure ASDF to use the Portage-installed Common Lisp libraries:

Portage currently creates a directory of symlinks which point to ASDF system definition files (*.asd) in  rather than adding a path to each individual ASDF system definition file.

The following examples show how to use gentoo-init.lisp from various Common Lisp implementations. Note how ASDF system definitions are being found under and compiled to, for example,.

From SBCL:

From CLISP:

The Gentoo-Maintained gentoo-init.lisp
Now that you understand how integration of Common Lisp implementations and libraries is achieved in Gentoo, you might want to install the ready-made which will install  to  for you. You could then load the file from your implementation's initialization file.