ASDF 3, pre-released as 2.28 on February 1st 2013, and released as 3.0.0 on May 15th 2013, is the current successor to Daniel Barlow's ASDF. It was rewritten for improved portability, robustness, usability, extensibility, configurability, internal consistency, and the ability to create standalone executables.
ASDF 3 contains two parts: asdf/defsystem and asdf/driver.
asdf/defsystem, is a tool to describe how Lisp source code is organized in systems, and how to build a system in term of actions that depend on previous actions.
It is roughly what Common Lisp hackers use to build software where C hackers might use GNU Make.
ASDF stands for Another System Definition Facility, in the continuity of the Lisp DEFSYSTEM of yore.
asdf/driver, also known as uiop, the Utilities for Implementation- and OS- Portability, is a Common Lisp portability library and runtime support system that helps you write Common Lisp software in a portable way.
In addition to many general-purpose Lisp utilities, it notably provides portable abstractions to gloss over implementation quirks, support hot-upgrade of code, manipulate pathnames, create programs, use command-line arguments, access the environment, use the filesystem, call other programs and parse their output, compile Lisp code, muffle conditions, or configure Lisp software.
ASDF will not download missing software components for you. For that, you want Quicklisp, that builds upon ASDF, and is great for pulling and installing tarballs of packages you may depend upon; we also recommend clbuild, that now builds upon Quicklisp, as a great tool for pulling from version control packages you need to modify or want to contribute to. We recommend you should not use asdf-install anymore, as it is an older similar piece of software that is both unmaintained and obsolete.
If you're unsatisfied with ASDF, other actively maintained build systems for Common-Lisp that may or may not satisfy you include: François-René Rideau's XCVB (trying to build object and image files deterministically and in parallel), or its polar opposite, Drew McDermott's YTools (trying to maintain coherence of the current Lisp image at a fine grain), the newcomer ASDlite (a somewhat improved incompatible variant of ASDF 1, less featureful than ASDF 3), or Alastair Bridgewater's interesting quick-build (unreleased, similar to faslpath below). Older systems that are not maintained anymore include Mark Kantrowitz's mk-defsystem (free software successor of the old proprietary DEFSYSTEM's and predecessor of ASDF, obsolete), Sean Ross's mudballs (an attempt at making things cleaner than in ASDF, aborted), Peter Etter's faslpath (a much simpler system establishing a mapping between packages and files) Alexander Kahl's evol (a reimplementation of the GNU autotools stack in Lisp, abandoned), and probably more. However, none of these systems seems to ever have had the traction of ASDF.
ASDF 3 now supports all CL implementations that seem to have any current user base, and then some.
Most implementations provide ASDF as a module, and you can simply (require "asdf"). (All of them but CLISP also accept :asdf, "ASDF" or 'asdf as an argument.) All of these implementations provide at least ASDF 2, and a few of them aready provide ASDF 3 (abcl, allegro, ccl, cmucl, ecl). Hopefully soon all will follow suit; but in the meantime, you can download ASDF 3, and use (asdf:load-system :asdf) from a properly configured ASDF 2 to upgrade to the latest, which you should do before you use ASDF for anything else.
A few implementations don't provide ASDF yet, but have announced they will in their next release. As for remaining implementations, they are obsolete and/or mostly unmaintained; still ASDF 3 supports them if you load it manually, though there might never be a next release to provide it through require.
| Provide "asdf" | Will provide it | Obsolete | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | abcl ccl clisp cmucl ecl mkcl sbcl xcl | gcl mcl | |
| Proprietary | allegro lispworks | scl | cormanlisp genera |
If there is an old or new implementation that we are missing, it shouldn't be hard to adapt ASDF to support it. Ask us!
Download any of the many packages available through Quicklisp to see as many examples.
You can read our manual:
Regarding the internal design of ASDF in general, and the work we did on ASDF 2, see the last draft version of our paper for ILC 2010, Evolving ASDF: More Cooperation, Less Coordination
Finally, while the manual covers all the basics, some advanced or new features remain underdocumented. Please contact our mailing-list (see below) for any issue that isn't well-documented enough.
Until we write more documentation on the further innovations of ASDF 3, the documentation strings, the source code, the changelog and the git log are unfortunately your best chances for discovering the available functionality.
Though they may lag behind the version here, ASDF comes bundled with most Lisps. To get the greatest and latest, you can:
git clone git://common-lisp.net/projects/asdf/asdf.git(note that our "master" branch is for current development; get our "release" branch for the latest stable release. Run make to create build/asdf.lisp);
Known extensions to ASDF include:
Former extensions, now superseded, include:
Join our mailing list, check the code out from git, send questions, ideas and patches!
To report bugs, you can use our launchpad project. If you're unsure about the bug or want to discuss how to fix it, you can send email to the project mailing-list below.
Join our mailing list, check the code out from git, send questions, ideas and patches!
