3 Implementation Support

CFFI supports various free and commercial Lisp implementations: Allegro CL, Corman CL, clisp, CMUCL, ECL, LispWorks, Clozure CL, SBCL and the Scieneer CL.

In general, you should work with the latest versions of each implementation since those will usually be tested against recent versions of CFFI more often and might include necessary features or bug fixes. Reasonable patches for compatibility with earlier versions are welcome nevertheless.

3.1 Limitations

Some features are not supported in all implementations.

Allegro CL

• Does not support the :long-long type natively.
• Unicode support is limited to the Basic Multilingual Plane (16-bit code points).

CMUCL

• No Unicode support. (8-bit code points)

Corman CL

• Does not support foreign-funcall.

ECL

• On platforms where ECL's dynamic FFI is not supported (ie. when :dffi is not present in *features*), cffi:load-foreign-library does not work and you must use ECL's own ffi:load-foreign-library with a constant string argument.
• Does not support the :long-long type natively.
• Unicode support is not enabled by default.

Lispworks

• Does not completely support the :long-long type natively in 32-bit platforms.
• Unicode support is limited to the Basic Multilingual Plane (16-bit code points).

SBCL

• Not all platforms support callbacks.