- The Jepsen project, which performs heavy testing of distributed database engines, and often finds bugs, is written in Clojure: https://jepsen.io/
- The Maxima computer algebra software is in Common Lisp
- The ITA flight fare search and pricing system is in Common Lisp
- and my beloved tiling window manager, stumpwm, is also written in Common Lisp
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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GNU Guile is a dialect of Lisp used by quite a few software.
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/
It is the configuration language of the Guix OS, a modern distro (very focused on computer freedom) , also by libraries and software like Gnucash, the GNU Debugger, a GUI toolkit for Gnome also, etc.
It is not a replacement of C, but can be used like Python.
The orange techbro forum site (news.ycombinator.com) is built on a Common Lisp backend (it used to be a Racket-based DSL before). IIRC Grammarly is (was?) also written in Common Lisp.
They posted something about lisp yesterday, that's how I came to ask this question.
According to Greenspun's tenth rule it's everywhere ; )
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
Nice.
Years ago (early 2000s) in a product that suffered from poor product management, I worked on a codebase that included some Scheme, and a built-in Scheme interpreter to run it. I always liked the language.I think it might still have a niche in embedded systems and game dev, among other places (I read somewhere that it's used in satellite software due to being hot reloadable)?
Doesn’t GIMP use Scheme for its plugins?
A quick google of GIMP docs tells me it uses C, Python and Script-fu so, sorta?
Thanks. :) So not technically Scheme, but a fork of Scheme.
Script-Fu is probably the oldest binding system for extending GIMP. It is also a Scheme variant, which evolved independently for many years now.
Basically big, over ambitious projects that have a single developer