Clisp, CMUCL, Scieneer Common Lisp (SCL), GCL (ANSI-enabled only), ECL, ABCL and SBCL can compile and execute Maxima. Allegro Common Lisp (ACL) and CCL might also work, but have not been fully tested.
Ports to other ANSI Common Lisps should be straightforward and are welcome; please post a message on the Maxima mailing list if you are interested in working on a port.
When Maxima is recompiled, the Lisp implementation is selected by
an argument of the form --enable-foolisp for the configure script.
./configure --help shows a list of the Lisp types recognized by
configure (among other options). It is possible to specify several
Lisp type(s) you want Maxima to be built with at the same time.
configure tries to autodetect the Lisp type if it is not specified,
but it has been reported that autodetection can fail.
This is the result of the run_testsuite() function for
Maxima 5.36.0 as reported on the Maxima mailing list:
gcl-2.6.12 152
sbcl-1.2.10 155
ccl-1.10 313
ecl-15.3.7 559
clisp-2.49 1060
sbcl-1.2.10 170
gcl-2.6.12 177
cmucl-20e 253
ccl-1.10 293
ecl-15.3.7 556
clisp-2.49 844
Clisp http://clisp.org
Clisp can be built with readline support, so Maxima has advanced command-line editing facilities when built with it.
Clisp is compiled to bytecodes, so Maxima running on Clisp is substantially slower than on Lisps compiled to machine instructions. On the other hand, Clisp contains code from CLN https://www.ginac.de/CLN/, a library for efficient computations with all kinds of numbers in arbitrary precision. Another advantage of Clisp is that byte code resulting in compiling a program on one computer might work on a computer running a different Clisp version. Also Clisp uses an extremely efficient memory handling which means it might not run out of memory where ECL, SBCL and GCL do.
CLISP version 2.49 has a bug that causes it to output garbled data if the front-end is fast enough to acknowledge a data packet while the next data packet is still being prepared.
There are Clisp implementations for many platforms including MS Windows and Unix-like systems.
CMUCL https://cmucl.org/
CMUCL is a fast option for Maxima on platforms where it is available. The rmaxima front-end provides advanced line-editing facilities for Maxima when compiled with CMUCL. rlwrap is available from: https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap
CMUCL versions: 18e and 19a and later are known to work.
There are CMUCL implementations only for Unix-like systems (not MS Windows).
Scieneer Common Lisp (SCL) https://web.archive.org/web/20171014210404/http://www.scieneer.com/scl/
Scieneer Common Lisp (SCL) is a fast option for Maxima for a range of Linux and Unix platforms. The SCL 1.2.8 release and later are supported. SCL offers a lower case, case sensitive, version which avoids the Maxima case inversion issues with symbol names. Tested front end options are: Maxima emacs mode available in the interfaces/emacs/ directory, the Emacs imaxima mode available from https://sites.google.com/site/imaximaimath/, and TeXmacs available from https://www.texmacs.org
GCL >= 2.6.13 is required to build Maxima.
GCL can be built with readline support, so Maxima has advanced command-line editing facilities when built with it. GCL produces a fast Maxima executable that profit from GCL's fast bignum algorithms.
Only the ANSI-enabled version of GCL works with Maxima, i.e.,
when GCL is built, it must be configured with the --enable-ansi flag,
i.e., execute ./configure --enable-ansi in the build directory
before executing make.
Whether GCL is ANSI-enabled or not can be determined by
inspecting the banner which is printed when GCL is executed;
if ANSI-enabled, the banner should say ANSI.
Also, the special variable *FEATURES* should include the keyword :ANSI-CL.
On Debian based Linux distributions you can enable/disable the ANSI version using: dpkg-reconfigure gcl
There are GCL implementations for many platforms including MS Windows and Unix-like systems.
SBCL https://www.sbcl.org
SBCL is a fork of CMUCL which differs in some minor details, but most notably, it is simpler to rebuild SBCL than CMUCL. For many tasks a Maxima compiled with SBCL is considerably faster than GCL. For other tasks GCL is faster than SBCL.
As SBCL doesn't use readline it is recommended to use rmaxima for using a command-line Maxima with SBCL. For common details of SBCL and CMUCL See CMUCL above.
Allegro Common Lisp https://franz.com/products/allegro-common-lisp/
Maxima should work with Allegro Common Lisp, but only limited testing has been done with these Lisp implementations. User feedback would be welcome.
CCL, formerly known as OpenMCL, is known to work with Maxima on all platforms where ccl runs including Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. There are appear to be some bugs in the 32-bit version of CCL, but the 64-bit version passes all tests.
ECL is known to work with Maxima and passes the testsuite. ECL runs on many platforms and OSes and is the lisp compiler used for Maxima on Android. It is faster than CLISP, but seems to tend more towards fragmenting the available memory. ECL tends to be slower than GCL or SBCL but faster than CLISP.
ECL must be configured to use the C compiler, building Maxima with the
ECL bytecode compiler is (currently) not possible. So do not use the
option --with-cmp=no when building ECL.
Armed Bear Common Lisp (ABCL) https://www.abcl.org
ABCL's main feature is that is tightly integrated into Java. That also means that it is an interpreter running in a virtual machine which makes it even slower than Clisp. Also Java doesn't automatically convert tail-recursive function calls to loops which means that in a few functions might run out of stack space faster than other Lisps.