Testimonials

Brad Garton (Columbia University Computer Music Center)
"I used ABCL (older, v. 0.0.10) as the interpreter underlying an object for a music/media graphical programming environment called Max/MSP. ABCL allowed me to embed an entire LISP interpreter inside the Max/MSP package, and it has worked extremely well. Max/MSP is designed primarily for real-time/interactive applications, used a lot by computer music academics, DJs/VJs, bizarro jazz performers, audio plugin developers, etc. With the embedded abcl object, I am able to schedule LISP functions and work interactively with complex processes -- the abcl interpreter has been rock-solid!

The source for the object is here (scroll down to the bottom of the page):

http://music.columbia.edu/~brad/maxlispj/

And I also used it extensively in a large application built with Max/MSP... it's an interactive 'book' where the generative music follows what a reader is reading and creates an appropriate sound setting for the text:

http://music.columbia.edu/~brad/BookOfDreams/

The music performance model underlying the shawm-like melodies is all coded using abcl.

So to all of you who have contributed (and still contribute!) to the development of this terrific package, a big THANK YOU!!!"
Alessio Stalla
I'm currently integrating ABCL in a small, unreleased open source project. It's a sort of graphical object browser for Java (but its GUI sucks badly for now...). It can be run locally or as a client-server application. I'm adding scripting support so you can access some functionality from Lisp (or in principle any other Java Scripting API compatible script engine, though I'm focusing on ABCL).
Hunter Monroe
"Maxima algebraic computation software compiles with ABCL. The test suite runs fairly quickly on Windows XP and, after work by Robert Dodier, 86 percent of the test suite is passed successfully, although some individual tests crash the suite. If you want to compile Maxima with ABCL lisp, check out the Maxima source code and following the instructions in INSTALL.lisp."
Ted Kosan
I am in the process of integrating ABCL with MathRider in preparation for when Maxima is able to run on it.
Alex Mizhari
I'm using ABCL for various web projects since aproximately 2004. None of them have gone public (so far), so i can't give a link. I released sort of framework for building web apps with ABCL was released into open source: abcl-web. Another thing probably worth mentioning -- bindings to Jena2 RDF/SPARQL library: http://abcl-web.sourceforge.net/rdf.html (it's sort of incomplete but usable, i think).
What i like in ABCL is that it has reasonably stable multithreading, does not crash unpredictably (unlike some other implementations) and can be fixed in more-or-less easy way if something goes bad, and access to Java libs, of course. I had some problems with it, though, to name some:
  • SLIME being botched (i suspect due to CLOS invoking compiler which is not reentrant),
  • CLOS not thread safe,
  • compiler producing wrong code.
That certainly made experience with ABCL less pleasant that it could be, but in general it was more-or-less good.