Common Lisp running natively over WebAssembly for the first time
A month or so ago, I ported a Common Lisp implementation (npt) to WebAssembly to make a silly blog post, because I was bored and have a lot of time on my hands to waste with things like this (I don't have a job, and because I have next to no experience, these meaningless, silly projects tend to fill what time I do have). This is significant as it's the first time Common Lisp in particular has ever been hosted on it; wasm has a few poor decisions in its design that make it less-than-conducive to being a target for Common Lisp, and a lot of the more interesting implementations require an…
Common Lisp running natively over WebAssembly for the first time launched on June 2, 2022 with 97 votes, #344 of 3,005 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.
In plain words
Common Lisp running natively over WebAssembly for the first time is a port of the npt Common Lisp implementation to WebAssembly. It enables developers to run Common Lisp code in web browsers and WebAssembly environments, marking the first successful native implementation of Common Lisp on this platform. The project addresses technical challenges specific to Common Lisp's design requirements when targeting WebAssembly.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
I once again saw Ron Garret’s story of Lisp at the JPL trending. I’ve had enough of it. I’ve read the article and variants thereof too many times, now. Ron’s a good guy—nothing against Ron. He’s articulate, well-grounded, and has responded to an email or two of mine in the past. Great guy, but I’m so sick of that article. There are other articles, probably less interesting, that I probably wouldn’t have read, but haven’t seen at all because of the constant reposting of the Lisp in Space article. It is directly reducing my ability to complain about the content of news aggregators, aside from complaining that devolves into meta complaining about how the content of news aggregators is getting…from soi-disant.srht.site
In the maker’s words, at launch
A month or so ago, I ported a Common Lisp implementation (npt) to WebAssembly to make a silly blog post, because I was bored and have a lot of time on my hands to waste with things like this (I don't have a job, and because I have next to no experience, these meaningless, silly projects tend to fill what time I do…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- IMI'm writing a leanpub book about Common Lisp web programming2013 · lispwebtales.ppenev.com · ▲107
Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser2025 · turtleware.eu · ▲111
A notebook-style Common Lisp environment2017 · github.com · ▲180The notebook-style Common Lisp environment. Contribute to tamamu/darkmatter development by creating an account on GitHub.
Firefox in WebAssemblyJul 2026 · developer.puter.com · ▲273This is the entire Firefox browser rendering to a element. Gecko, all UI components, and the Spidermonkey JS engine are all compiled and running in WebAssembly. Here are a few things you might find interesting: - This is fully end to end encrypted! We use the WISP protocol for TCP-over-websockets. - There is a novel WASM->JS JIT for experimental site speedup - This port cost over 25k in opus/fable tokens for debugging and JIT research This was just a fun experiment to push the boundaries of WebAssembly. For a more usable "browser in browser" experience, we also built…
A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF2025 · savannah.nongnu.org · ▲96Implementation of the standard is still not complete, but breakpoints and stepping work quite well! It also has some support for watchpoints, that no implementation has. Now it ships with ASDF and is capable of loading systems! Let me know if you like it. Support on Patreon or Liberapay is much appreciated
- IWI wrote a technical history book on LispFeb 2026 · berksoft.ca · ▲252
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
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