SBCLBench
A grading harness for Common Lisp and SBCL specifically that helps a team audit whether a codebase will still run correctly on a new SBCL release (like 2.6.7) by running each commit's smoke tests across SBCL versions, Linux distros, and ARM64 vs. x86-64 in CI.
Lisp-using engineering teams with long-lived codebases (finance, aerospace, CAD)
- One-command pre-release audit: 'Will my app still build on SBCL 2.6.7?' with green/yellow/red per platform
- Diff view between SBCL changelog bullets and your codebase's touched APIs, so you see exactly what to retest
- Parallel test runs on ARM64 Linux, x86-64 Linux, macOS, and BSD with results sent to GitHub Actions / GitLab CI
- API stability scoring that surfaces accidental reliance on undocumented SBCL internals (SB-INTROSPECT-derived)
The 2.6.7 release changes several documented behaviors (FDEFINITION returns outermost wrapper, EQL complex types, SIMD on ARM64) — any Lisp team upgrading needs to know which of those affect them, and SBCL still has no dedicated CI tool.
SBCL 2.6.7 is real (released July 28, 2026) and breaking changes are documented in changelogs (e.g., MAKE-ARRAY UNDEFINED error in 2.6.3), but the triggering HN post had only 25 points / 1 comment and r/sbcl is a small subreddit — niche audience.Download - Steel Bank Common Lisp ↗Steel Bank Common Lisp - Reddit ↗
No dedicated SBCL upgrade-audit CI harness exists; existing tools (40ants/setup-lisp, fosskers/cl-action) only install a chosen implementation rather than grading a codebase across an SBCL version/distro/arch matrix.GitHub - fosskers/common-lisp: An all-inclusive testing and caching ... ↗GitHub Action to Setup Common Lisp for CI - 40Ants ↗
Common Lisp ecosystem is price-sensitive and dominated by free/open-source tooling (SBCL is permissively licensed, setup-lisp/cl-action are free); Reddit evidence shows firms with multi-arch builds rely on internal custom patches rather than paid tooling.Steel Bank Common Lisp - Reddit ↗About - Steel Bank Common Lisp ↗
SBCL is actively maintained with monthly releases since the late 1990s, and long-lived regulated codebases exist, but the broader Common Lisp ecosystem has been slowly shrinking for decades, capping long-term ceiling.News - Steel Bank Common Lisp ↗Steel Bank Common Lisp / sbcl / [f2ce4b] - SourceForge ↗
Buildable as a thin orchestration layer over existing free GitHub Actions (40ants/setup-lisp, cl-action) plus the official SBCL platform-table binaries; ARM64 vs x86-64 is just a CI runner matrix, no novel compiler work required.Download - Steel Bank Common Lisp ↗GitHub Action to Setup Common Lisp for CI - 40Ants ↗