Functionality

WCL is currently organized into three shared libraries:

• Common Lisp - implements approximately 80% of the functions, macros, etc. in the Common Lisp manual, as well as the loop macro, the condition system, a foreign function interface, and some popular extensions to Common Lisp.

• Compiler - implements the compiler and linker functions

• CLXR5 - implements an interface to the X window systems.

The sizes of these libraries are shown in table . All libraries were compiled with GCC 2.1 [#!gcc!#] into position-independent code. Unfortunately, this tends to make them a bit slower than position-dependent code, but it is necessary for code sharing.

While some of the more obscure Common Lisp functions and features are not implemented yet, enough of Common Lisp has been implemented to allow WCL to completely compile, link and debug itself, thus supporting its own development. Because all of the functionality provided by WCL is provided in the form of shared libraries, the executable for the development environment is only 49kbytes.

The following packages also compile and run, but are not provided as shared libraries yet:

• May Day version of PCL [#!pcl!#]

• XP Pretty Printer

• Logical Pathnames

All three of these systems should eventually be integrated into the Common Lisp library. Of these systems, PCL presents the most integration work because it contains significant boot strapping and initialization code that would make starting the library too slow. More work must be done to eliminate these initialization steps or perform them at compile or link time. Together, the libraries and systems described above implement most of the functionality described in the second edition of the Common Lisp manual [#!cltl2!#].