ASDF 3
ASDF is the de facto standard build facility for Common Lisp.
Your Lisp implementation probably contains a copy of ASDF,
which you can load using (require "asdf").
ASDF 3 is the current successor to
Daniel Barlow's ASDF (created on August 1st 2001) and
François-René Rideau's ASDF 2 (released May 31st 2010).
It was rewritten for improved portability, robustness, usability,
extensibility, configurability, internal consistency,
and the ability to deliver standalone executables,
all while maintaining substantial backward compatibility.
Its notable versions include pre-release 2.27 on February 1st 2013,
first stable release 3.0.1 on May 16th 2013,
major releases 3.1.2 on May 6th 2014,
3.2.0 on January 10th 2017 and 3.3.0 on October 6th 2017.
Release 3.3.6 was published in August 2022.
The latest release is 3.3.7, published in January 2024.
What it is
ASDF is what Common Lisp hackers use to build and load software.
It is the successor of the Lisp DEFSYSTEM of yore.
ASDF stands for Another System Definition Facility.
ASDF 3 contains two parts: asdf/defsystem and uiop.
- asdf/defsystem
-
is a tool to describe
how Lisp source code is organized in systems,
and how to build and load these systems.
The build happens based on a plan in term of
actions that depend on previous actions;
the plan is computed from the structure of the systems.
Typical actions consist in compiling a Lisp source file
(unless already up to date)
and loading the resulting compilation output
(unless both already loaded and up to date).
And you must typically compile and load
files that define packages, macros, variables,
before you may compile and load other files that use them.
If you come from the C/C++ world, ASDF covers a bit of what
each of make, autoconf, dlopen and
libc do for C programs:
it orchestrates the compilation and dependency management,
handles some of the portability issues,
dynamically finds and loads code,
and offers some portable system access library
(see uiop below for the latter).
Except everything is different in Common Lisp,
and ultimately much simpler overall,
though it does require acquiring some basic concepts
that do not exactly match those of the C and Unix world.
Importantly, ASDF builds all software in the current Lisp image,
as opposed to building software into separate processes.
asdf/defsystem is the part that people usually refer to
as ASDF,
with uiop being only a supporting library,
that happens to be distributed at the same time, by necessity.
- uiop
-
the Utilities for Implementation- and
OS- Portability,
formerly known as asdf/driver,
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.
See its
README.md
for an overview,
and the documentation as extracted from its docstrings by
Declt or
HEΛP
(NB: in HEΛP, you can, though it's not obvious,
scroll the list of packages with a scrollbar
on the right of the top-left pane,
and then click on the package you're interested in
to browse its symbols).
uiop is distributed as part of ASDF:
its source code is transcluded in
the single-file asdf.lisp being distributed
and the precompiled fasls provided by Lisp implementations.
ASDF relies heavily on it
for its portability layer and runtime support,
particularly so as to handle pathnames and filesystem access.
uiop is useful on its own
and can also be compiled and distributed separately.
What it is not
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.
ASDF is also not a tool to build or run Common Lisp software
from the Unix command-line.
For that, you want cl-launch,
buildapp, or
roswell.
If you're unsatisfied with ASDF,
beside helping with our
TODO list,
you might be interested in other build systems for Common-Lisp:
- Google's deterministic and scalable build system
Bazel,
for which Lisp support is available:
bazelisp.
- François-René Rideau's
XCVB
(building object and image files deterministically
and in parallel, but
not actively maintained and bitrotten since 2012;
a hypothetical ASDF 4 could conceivably be evolved to support
these features thanks to the groundwork laid by ASDF 3;
or you could use Bazel).
- Drew McDermott's
YTools
(the polar opposite of XCVB, trying to maintain coherence
of the current Lisp image at a fine grain). Sadly, Drew
has recently passed away.
There are probably more. However, none of these systems seems
to ever have had the traction of ASDF, probably because
none was technically superior and/or portable enough (if at all)
to compensate for the first mover advantage.
Supported Implementations
ASDF 3 now supports all CL implementations
that seem to have any current user base, and then some.
But ASDF does not magically turn
broken implementations into working ones,
and some ASDF or UIOP features may not work
on less-maintained implementations that do not support them
(see below).
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 these implementations provide ASDF 3.1 or later in their latest version,
but your software distribution might have an older version.
As for remaining implementations,
they are obsolete and/or mostly unmaintained;
ASDF was made to run with each of them at some point,
but some hacking is probably required
to make the latest ASDF work well
with the latest release of these implementations:
-
CLISP is generally well-tested with ASDF,
though it has a few minor bugs.
The implementation has received only
minimal maintenance since 2010,
and the last official release doesn't ship with ASDF,
or often has antique version of ASDF tucked on it.
However, ASDF has been recently updated
in its source control system,
and there is hope of a new release some day soon.
If needs be, you can replace CLISP's provided ASDF
with a newer one, or use an upgrade on top of that.
- clasp contributors have recently been providing fixes
for ASDF on clasp, and it has been added to the test
suite.
- As of version 1.9, ABCL support is good. There were
some regressions in 1.8.
- Clozure CL and CMUCL are getting harder to support,
since they don't run well or at all, respectively, on the
M1 hardware that I (rpg) use as my primary platform.
-
CormanLisp was recently open-sourced.
Its bundled ASDF has not yet been updated from 1.x;
ASDF 3 should work fine with it, but
several features were disabled
because CormanLisp was insufficiently compliant with the CLHS,
and requires some work in this regard.
Ask the new CormanLisp maintainers for updates.
-
ECL is generally well-tested with ASDF, but
its bytecode compiler doesn't support the bundle operations, and
support for Windows seems to be less stable.
For instance, as of January 2017,
cl:require and ext:system
(and thus uiop:run-program)
seem not to be working correctly on Windows.
-
GCL is somewhat maintained but
its maintainer doesn't seem to care about ASDF,
and hasn't replied for years to requests for bug fixes or
for providing ASDF via (require "asdf").
-
Genera was never open-source and never bundled ASDF,
but should otherwise just work with a recent ASDF 3,
if you somehow have a license and a working version.
There are rumors of people doing active development with it
and having minor patches to improve ASDF on it.
-
MCL similarly was open-sourced, but never bundled ASDF;
ASDF 3 should work just fine with it,
but Rosetta is not supported in the latest versions of MacOS X,
so a lot of work is required to make something out of it
— at which point, you might just use CCL.
-
Mocl has its own heavily modified variant of ASDF2, and
is the only implementation not currently supported by ASDF3.
To make it work with ASDF 3 would require ASDF to be taught about
natively supporting cross-compilation.
-
SCL was seemingly abandoned and never open-sourced.
It never bundled ASDF, but otherwise
should just work with a recent ASDF 3,
if you somehow have a license and a working version.
-
XCL is now an abandoned experiment.
It provides some old ASDF 2;
but you can replace it with ASDF 3, which works well with it,
inasmuch as anything works at all with XCL.
|
Provide ASDF 3.1 or later |
No ASDF |
Unmaintained |
|---|
| Free |
ABCL,
CCL,
Clasp,
CLISP,
CMUCL,
ECL,
Mezzano,
MKCL,
SBCL
|
CormanLisp,
GCL,
MCL
|
XCL |
|---|
| Proprietary |
Allegro,
LispWorks
|
|
Genera,
mocl,
SCL |
|---|
To deal with an implementation that does not yet provide ASDF 3.1 or later,
we provide
a script
that will install the ASDF from your git checkout
to where your implementation goes looking for it
when you (require "asdf").
Note that upgrading from an old version of ASDF 2 or earlier
is possible, but quite complex to do right in a robust way,
and we do not recommend it.
Also note that mocl only supports
a heavily modified variant of ASDF 2,
and will require robust cross-compilation support
to be added to ASDF
before it is actually supported.
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!
Examples
Download any of the many packages available through
Quicklisp
to see as many examples.
Documentation
You can read our manual:
The first few sections,
Loading ASDF,
Configuring ASDF
and Using ASDF
will get you started as a simple user.
If you want to define your own systems, further read the section
Defining systems with defsystem.
There is now also a
Best Practices
document explaining recommended usage patterns when writing .asd files,
and detailing common pitfalls or deprecated practices to avoid.
About the latest developments in ASDF 3.2 and ASDF 3.3, see our demo
Delivering Common Lisp Applications with ASDF 3.3
(2-page PDF,
slides,
git).
Regarding the internal design of ASDF in general,
and the work we did on ASDF 3,
see the extended version (26 pages) of our paper
ASDF 3, or Why Lisp is Now an Acceptable Scripting Language
(PDF,
git).
The shorter version (8 pages), presented at
ELS 2014,
focuses on ASDF 3 and misses historical and technical information
(PDF,
HTML).
Regarding ASDF 3, see also the slides of the
ASDF 3 tutorial presented at ELS 2013,
and for an introduction to the source code, this video:
ASDF 3.1 walkthrough.
For details about our previous work on ASDF 2,
see our paper presented at
ILC 2010,
Evolving ASDF: More Cooperation, Less Coordination
(git).
Finally, while the manual covers all the basics,
some advanced or new features remain underdocumented.
Please contact our mailing-list (see below)
regarding any feature that isn't well-documented enough.
Until we write more documentation on the further innovations of ASDF,
the documentation strings,
the source code,
the changelog
and the git log
are unfortunately your best chances
for discovering the available functionality.
Getting it
Though they may lag behind the version here,
ASDF comes bundled with most Lisps.
To get the greatest and latest, you can:
Extensions
Known extensions to ASDF include:
-
fiveam-asdf, use the FiveAM library to
implement an ASDF:TEST-OP.
-
asdf-dependency-grovel,
to compute the actual dependencies in a big ASDF system.
- asdf-encodings,
to compile Lisp source files with character encodings other than UTF-8.
- asdf-finalizers,
to allow macros to include code to be evaluated
at the end of a file being compiled.
- asdf-flv,
to bind file-local variables around the compilation of some files.
- asdf-system-connections,
lets you specify systems that are automatically loaded when
two other systems are loaded, to connect them.
- cffi,
lets you interface between functions and datastructures written in C
and functions written in Lisp,
including support for
automatically detecting constants from C macros,
linking to dynamic (and now also static) libraries, and
writing your own wrapper code in C.
- poiu,
to compile a system in parallel on a multiprocessor machine.
Former extensions, now superseded, include:
- asdf-binary-locations
used to allow one to redirect where ASDF 1 created its output files,
so they don't clash between implementations
and don't pollute source directories.
It is superseded by asdf/defsystem's builtin
asdf-output-translations mechanism;
a limited compatibility mode is available to easily convert
your former ABL configuration into an AOT configuration.
common-lisp-controller and cl-launch
used to provide similar mechanisms,
and have also been superseded by asdf-output-translations
(built into ASDF 2 and later).
- asdf-bundle, née asdf-ecl,
allowed you to create a single-file bundle out of a system,
for easier delivery.
It is now a builtin part of asdf/defsystem,
and allows users to deliver a single FASL for a system,
a standalone executable program (on supported implementations),
or an image containing your system precompiled.
- asdf-condition-control,
initially part of XCVB's xcvb-driver,
allowed you to muffle uninteresting conditions during compilation.
Is now superseded by equivalent functionality in uiop.
- asdf-contrib,
an empty package that used to collect dependencies on other systems
in the list above and below.
- asdf-package-system,
to compile Lisp source files with one package per file
that also determines dependencies, in the style of
quick-build or
faslpath
(this functionality is built into recent versions
of ASDF 3.1 and later,
but this package exists for backward compatibility
with earlier versions of ASDF 3;
search the manual for package-inferred-system).
- asdf-utils was a collection of utilities
that originated with ASDF.
It is now superseded by uiop, aka asdf/driver,
which is part of ASDF,
and exports its functionality
in its own package uiop.
Contributing
Join our mailing list, check the code out from git,
send questions, ideas and patches!
Reporting Bugs
To report bugs, you can use our
common-lisp.net 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.
Note that the most valuable thing you can send this way
are test cases,
if possible as .script files
readily runnable by our test system.
If you're courageous, send us merge requests on
gitlab.
While bug fixes are useful,
they are not usually as valuable as test cases:
small easy fixes will be obvious from the test case,
and large fixes written by someone who isn't
either a maintainer or working tightly with one
will probably not be correct and not fit the codebase:
any modification at one point is likely to have repercussions
at other unobvious places in the codebase,
for the code to be correct in a wider variety of scenarios
than casual developers usually think about.
Now, if you're willing to become a maintainer,
you're welcome to join the team!
NB: Previously, we had done bug-tracking on
launchpad.net,
but we are now consolidating project management on
common-lisp.net.
If you are interested in hacking on ASDF, you may look at the bugs on launchpad
for more work to do (if only to migrate the bugs to gitlab).
Mailing Lists
- asdf-devel
A list for questions, suggestions, bug reports, patches, and so on.
It's for everyone and everything. Please join the conversation!
asdf-devel
mailman site to subscribe
- asdf-announce
A low-volume mailing-list for announcements only,
mostly regarding new releases.
Posting is restricted to project administrators
and to important notices.
Please subscribe to it
if you're a Lisp implementation or distribution vendor,
who needs to know when to upgrade the ASDF you distribute,
but are otherwise not interested in day to day design and
development.
asdf-announce mailman site to subscribe
Contributing
Join our mailing list, check the code out from git,
send questions, ideas and patches!
What is happening
For a detailed description of changes see our Changelog
- January 2024
- Release of 3.3.7; seventh bugfix release for the 3.3
release series, which notably adds compatibility with
Allegro CL 11.0.
- August 2022
- Release of 3.3.6; sixth bugfix release for the 3.3
release series.
- July 2021
- Release of 3.3.5: fifth bugfix release for the 3.3
release series.
- February 2020
- Release of 3.3.4: fourth bugfix release for the 3.3
release series.
- March 2019
- Release of 3.3.3: third bugfix release for the 3.3 release series.
- May 2018
- Release of 3.3.2: second bugfix release for the 3.3 release series.
- November 2017
- Release of 3.3.1: bugfix release for 3.3.0 addressing
a backwards-incompatibility issue with timestamp computations,
and other minor breakage.
- October 2017
- Release of 3.3.0, with substantial revision to the build plan
to correct handle multiple phases of loading, due to e.g.
DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON dependencies.
- April 2017
- Release of 3.2.1, with many small bugfixes and cleanups.
Presentation at ELS 2017 about ASDF 3.3.
- January 2017
- Release of 3.2.0, a release containing many notable improvements,
such as a new portable uiop:launch-program facility for
spawning asynchronous subprocesses
(with many thanks to Elias Pipping),
a uiop:with-deprecation facility to handle
progressive deprecation of functions,
a cleanup and tightening of the internal dependency model
(you are now required to use make-operation
to instantiate an operation class; also you'll be WARNed if your
.asd file contains improperly named secondary systems),
a systematic pass of adding documentation to all functions,
many fixes to small bugs and portability issues
across all underlying platforms and operating systems,
an improved test suite,
and the removal of some long deprecated functionality.
- March 2016
- Release of 3.1.7, another bug fix release for the 3.1.x series.
- October 2015
- Although we had hoped that ASDF 3.1.5 would be the final release
in the ASDF 3.1 series, a number of bug reports led us to prepare
release 3.1.6. Support for Windows continues to improve, and we wished
to release a number of bug fixes, and support the recent Allegro Common
Lisp 10.0 release.
- July 2015
- An extensive bout of bug-fixing, notably on Windows, leads to
release of ASDF 3.1.5 on 21 July 2015. XDG handling has been improved to
be more compliant with the standard. Preliminary support for
immutable systems has been added.
- May 2015
- With the LispWorks 7.0 release, all actively maintained CL implementations
are now providing ASDF 3.0 or later, and
support for older variants is now officially dropped.
- October 2014
- More bug fixing leads to release of 3.1.4 on 10 October 2014.
There should be no incompatibilities.
See the Changelog for more details.
- August 2014
- The ASDF mailing lists have been reestablished, in particular
asdf-announce, which should allow CL implementers better access to only
the information they want about ASDF development.
- May 2014 to July 2014
- ASDF bug fixing from 3.1.2 leads to release of 3.1.3, a major bug
fix release. We strongly urge implementors that have shipped with 3.1.2
to upgrade to 3.1.3. There should be no incompatibilities, and some
very important bug fixes are provided. See the Changelog for more details.
- July 2013 to May 2014
- François-René Rideau has resigned as maintainer
but remained an active developer.
Robert P. Goldman is interim maintainer until someone more gifted,
charming, dedicated, and better-looking can be secured to fill the role.
ASDF 3.0.2 was released in July 2013, 3.0.3 in October 2013, and 3.1.2 in May 2014.
In addition to significant improvements and bug fixes,
notably better Windows support,
ASDF 3.1.2 notably sports the package-inferred-system extension.
- November 2012 to June 2013
-
François-René Rideau completely rewrites ASDF
and publishes ASDF 3, pre-released as 2.27 in February 2013,
and released as 3.0.1 in May 2013.
It now includes both the traditional asdf/defsystem
and a formalized portability library uiop (née asdf/driver).
asdf/defsystem is a backward-compatible reimplementation of ASDF
with correct timestamp propagation based on a consistent dependency model,
and featuring support for bundle output, deferred warnings check, and more.
uiop provides many abstractions to write portable Common Lisp programs.
Last version: 3.0.1.
- December 2009 to October 2012
- François-René Rideau is de facto maintainer,
with notable contributions from Robert P. Goldman, but also
Juanjo Garcia-Ripoll and James Anderson.
ASDF 2.000 is released in May 2010
with many clean-ups, better configurability, some new features,
and updated documentation.
The ASDF 2 series culminates with ASDF 2.26 in October 2012,
which in addition to many bug fixes and small features
includes support for file encodings, around-compile and compile-check hooks.
Last version: 2.26.
- May 2006 to November 2009
- Gary King is de facto maintainer,
with notable contributions from
Robert P. Goldman, Nikodemus Siivola, Christophe Rhodes, Daniel Herring.
Many small features and bug fixes,
making the project more maintainable,
moving to using git and common-lisp.net.
Last version: 1.369.
- May 2004 to April 2006
- Christophe Rhodes is de facto maintainer,
with notable contributions from
Nikodemus Siivola, Peter Van Eynde, Edi Weitz, Kevin Rosenberg.
The system made slightly more robust, a few more features.
Last version: 1.97.
- August 2001 to May 2004
- Created then developed by Daniel Barlow, with notable contributions from
Christophe Rhodes, Kevin Rosenberg, Edi Weitz, Rahul Jain.
Last version: 1.85.
