This has been a long time coming; Bill announced the existence of SBCL to the world on the CMUCL development mailing list in December 1999:
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 18:53:46 -0600 From: William Harold Newman <william.newman@airmail.net> To: cmucl-imp@cons.org Subject: It's alive! (SBCL, a CMU CL variant which bootstraps cleanly) Message-ID: <19991214185346.A1703@magic.localdomain>
Since then, a large number of people have worked on the system (including me since at least October 2001, according to this diary entry); it's been a pleasure to work with so many bright and motivated people in a kind of directed anarchy: towards goals that we mostly shared, even if we differ in the details. Since branching off, we've developed support for Unicode, native threading, 64-bit architectures and executable delivery; people have contributed support for esoteric (and sometimes even ubiquitous) platforms; we've removed an interpreter, leaving us with only an interactive compiler — and then developed another interpreter to put in its place. Some of the development team have found employment to enhance the system, while others have moved on to pastures new; users have been encouraged to adapt the system to their needs, many of them contributing enhancements back to the mainline codebase; startups are using it as part of their toolchain; established companies too, for application development and deployment.
I've learnt a lot while being a part of this, and I hope to learn more in the future.