PicoLisp Download

If you would like to get some hands-on experience with PicoLisp, you can download the latest version here. It should compile and run on current 32-bit GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X (Darwin) and Cygwin/Win32 distributions, and on 64-bit GNU/Linux systems.

PicoLisp is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under the conditions of the MIT/X11 License (see COPYING). Commercial support -- mentoring, consulting, training, development -- is available upon request (1 BTC/h).

Please take a look at the README file, the manual page, the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), the PicoLisp Tutorial, the guides to PicoLisp Application Development and Native C Calls, or the PicoLisp Reference, and download

Then follow the instructions in the INSTALL file.

A native 64-bit version is also contained in the release. Please refer to the documentation in doc64/README, doc64/asm and doc64/structures.

There are two (free) Books about PicoLisp available online:

You can read and search the books on Scribd, browse the sources on Github, or download the PDF versions via the given links.

Also, the release contains now a pure Java version of PicoLisp, called "Ersatz PicoLisp". Please check ersatz/README. You can also download it separately, as a minimal setup which runs on any system with a 1.6 Java runtime environment: ersatz.tgz. Enhancements and extensions in Samuel Dennis Borlongan's Repo.

The PicoLisp Home Page at home.picolisp.com holds further articles and documentation. The site is still under construction (powered by PicoLisp, of course), so please be patient! Its sources are available at wiki.tgz.

Any feedback is welcome! Many concepts in the PicoLisp system are not well documented yet, and might not be obvious to a traditional Lisp programmer. So please don't hesitate to ask, and join our discussion in the PicoLisp Mailing List or at the IRC #picolisp channel on FreeNode.net! (see also The Mail Archive and Gmane.org). From time to time, I try to post some news, hints and insights on Twitter.

If you like, you can make a donation for the development and maintenance of PicoLisp.

Note that there is also an ongoing development ("testing") version of the next release available (still subject to change), a Mercurial repository, and an archive of previous releases (see below).

For something even smaller, download miniPicoLisp.tgz. It is a minimal version, without support for databases, UTF-8, bignums, IPC, networking and other system-dependent functions. A kind of "pure" PicoLisp (not "pure Lisp"!). It supports the full PicoLisp language, but runs faster, and uses even less memory space. It should also not be restricted to Unix. In addition, it compiles and runs also on 64-bit systems.

Jon Kleiser wrote an OpenGL library (native in the 64-bit version, or separate at gl.tgz for the 32-bit version), and a Chinese Checkers program running on top of it.

Doug Snead wrote about his experiences in porting PicoLisp to Cygwin.

Henrik Sarvell's introduction "At a First Glance" gives an excellent entry point to practical usage, and explains several concepts in detail.

An introduction to writing browser-based applications in PicoLisp, using the XHTML/CSS GUI-Framework, can be found in the "PicoLisp Application Development" tutorial. In the last section, it describes a minimal but quite complete Application. ERP in 800 lines! :-)

Some philosophical and practical aspects are discussed in "A Radical Approach to Application Development (PDF)", and a description of PicoLisp DB and GUI Development principles is in "A Unifying Language for Database And User Interface Development".

Hope you enjoy :-)

Release Archive

(Software Lab.)