Common Lisp implementation with CFFI and thread support on Mac, Windows, and Linux?

Question

Goal: Install Hunchentoot and be able to run Hunchentoot as a background thread.

This is what I do:

1. Install Common Lisp.
2. Install Quicklisp.
3. (ql:quickload "hunchentoot")
4. (hunchentoot:start (make-instance 'hunchentoot:acceptor :port 4242))

The last command is supposed to start Hunchentoot, then return to the interpreter for further Common Lisp forms.

For CLISP, SBCL, ABCL, ECL, and CCL, I get one of two results:

• Hunchentoot's dependency Bordeaux Threads fails to install.
• hunchentoot:start hangs. The web page never loads, and never 404s.

Answer 1

Lispbox offers a working copy of CCL, CFFI, threads, Emacs, and SLIME. Quicklisp and Hunchentoot work well. There isn't an installer yet, but the darn thing works :)

Answer 2

AFAIK the win32 implementations of CLISP and SBCL don't support multiple threads whereas Hunchentoot depends on this feature (dependency to Bordeaux Threads). Hunchentoot works well with Clozure Common Lisp.

Answer 3

Regardless of OS, if this returns nil in SBCL, you'll need to enable threads:

(find :sb-thread *features*)

Enable threads: Using the pre-compiled SBCL, compile latest version from source, but note the INSTALL instructions on enabling threads. You'll create a file called "customize-target-features.lisp" to contain the lambda expression given in the instructions. (Tip: compile from within 'screen' detached, redirect to log file or similar since a Terminal window may become i/o bound and actually slow-down the compile.)

SBCL pre-compiled for Linux has threads enabled, but pre-compiled for MacOSX, FreeBSD and Windows are without threads enabled. This may change with future releases.

I've confirmed that using the current versions of SBCL (compiled to enable threads) and QuickLisp on MacOSX 10.6.6/x86-64, you should get the "Hunchentoot Default Page" with "Hunchentoot 1.1.1 (SBCL 1.0.46) at localhost:4242" when visiting http://localhost:4242/.

Answer 4

LispWorks is the platform on which Hunchentoot was designed, and is available on all three operating systems.