I’ve been following the status of Lisp on ppc64le lately.
I’m running ppc64le Debian sid. Just after I had set up my system, I did some experimentation with what Debian packages had to offer. ECL was the only Lisp that worked, so I started using it for various projects. (I’ve since learned on #sbcl that CLISP built from source is also a good option.)
Ideally I wanted to be able to use SBCL, so I wondered how far into an SBCL bootstrap I could get with ECL as the host compiler. A few months ago, I found the answer was not very far.
Since then though, the SBCL maintainers have been hard at work on two fronts: making SBCL bootstrap against ECL again (on any architecture) and porting SBCL to PPC64.
Recently with a few minor local changes, I was able to bootstrap SBCL natively on my Talos II starting with ECL, then build SBCL again with the bootstrapped SBCL. I had to build ECL from the tip of its development branch, but it has a nice build system and, being based on C, doesn’t require any bootstrapping steps.
So the SBCL ppc64 port is really shaping up; hopefully the next release will advertise ppc64le support. For now, plenty of packages work for me already, like SILME and Quicklisp.
I’d also like to try the same bootstrap procedure on ppc64be ABI version 1 (Debian sid) and ppc64be ABI version 2 (another distro, probably Adélie). I’m working on setting up an environment with qemu-system-ppc64.
Anyway, I’m happy that I can now use SBCL on my Talos II.