Kyoto Common Lisp is an implementation of Common Lisp

Common Lisp

Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...

 by T. Yuasa and M. Hagiya, written in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 to run under Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

-like operating systems. KCL is compiled to ANSI C

ANSI C

ANSI C refers to the family of successive standards published by the American National Standards Institute for the C programming language. Software developers writing in C are encouraged to conform to the standards, as doing so aids portability between compilers.-History and outlook:The first...

. It conforms to Common Lisp as described in the 1984 first edition of Guy Steele's book Common Lisp the Language

Common Lisp the Language

Common Lisp the Language is an influential book by Guy L. Steele about Common Lisp.-Before standardization:The first edition served as the basis for the ANSI Common Lisp standard. It was written by Guy L. Steele, Jr., Scott Fahlman, Richard P. Gabriel, David A. Moon, and Daniel L...

 and is available under a licence agreement.

KCL is notable in that it was implemented from scratch, outside of the standard committee, solely on the basis of the specification. It was one of the first Common Lisp implementations ever, and exposed a number of holes and mistakes in the specification that had gone unnoticed.

Derived software

Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL) is a collection of ports, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KCL made by William Schelter. AKCL has been ported to a range of Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 workstations.

GNU Common Lisp

GNU Common Lisp

GNU Common Lisp is the GNU Project's Common Lisp compiler, an evolutionary development of Kyoto Common Lisp. It produces native object code by first generating C code and then calling a C compiler....

 (GCL) was derived from AKCL. It is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/ .

Embeddable Common Lisp

Embeddable Common Lisp

Embeddable Common Lisp is a LGPL Common Lisp implementation aimed at producing a small-footprint Lisp system that can be embedded into existing C-based applications...

(ECL) was also derived from KCL. It is available at http://ecls.sourceforge.net/ .