Common Lisp: install SBCL on Windows

In this post, we will see how to install SBCL, one of the most famous Common Lisp implementations, on Windows. We will modify the Path environment variable. We will not cover SBCL’s access from Emacs here.

Let’s go…

Go to https://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html and click on the cell at the intersection of the Windows row and the x86-64 column (assuming your Windows version is 64-bit).

At the time of writing this post, the latest accessible version is 2.5.6.

The file sbcl-2.5.6-x86-64-windows-binary.msi is downloaded. Launch it, and install SBCL anywhere (we will move it just after).

Move it to the desired directory, for example c:/programs2/sbcl-2.5.6.

In this case, the executable is located at the following location:
c:/programs2/sbcl-2.5.6/sbcl.exe
and we can observe the existence of the subdirectory
c:/programs2/sbcl-2.5.6/contrib/

Double-click on the executable c:/programs2/sbcl-2.5.6/sbcl.exe to launch SBCL:

The * symbol is a command prompt.

We can try a simple operation like (+ 2 2), which will return 4.

To quit SBCL, use the instruction (quit) or (exit).

It is recommended to add the directory containing the executable, namely C:\programs2\sbcl-2.5.6, to the Windows (user) Path environment variable. This will allow launching SBCL from anywhere.