Compatibility

Implementation

cl-process-kit targets SBCL only. It is not portable Common Lisp and does not aim to be: sb-ext, sb-posix, sb-thread, and sb-alien are used throughout, and the native spawn and PTY backends under native/ are POSIX-specific C. Other Common Lisp implementations are out of scope.

Platforms

Platform	Status
x86_64-linux	Verified on every push and pull request by CI
aarch64-darwin	Declared by the flake and exercised locally; not covered by CI

Both platforms are declared in flake.nix's systems, but the check job in .github/workflows/ci.yml runs on ubuntu-latest and does not pass --all-systems, so only x86_64-linux is verified automatically. A change that only builds on macOS can therefore still break Linux, and the reverse is caught only when someone runs the suite on a Mac.

Running on both is worth the effort, because process semantics diverge exactly where this library works: signal delivery, process-group reaping, and whether closing a descriptor interrupts a thread already blocked reading it (macOS and the BSDs do; Linux does not). Two defects shipped in 0.2.0 were invisible on macOS and obvious on Linux — see 1.0.0's ### Correctness notes in the changelog.

Seven process-group tests are it-skipped under #+linux; see Development for why, and for how to run the Linux suite locally in a container.

Stability

From 1.0.0 onward the exported API follows semantic versioning. The exported surface is unchanged from 0.2.0; what 1.0.0 added was evidence about behaviour on the platforms above rather than new API.

Symbols that are not exported from the process-kit package are internal and may change in any release, including the %-prefixed helpers that appear in backtraces.

The optional cl-process-kit/pty system depends on cl-tty-kit and on a native shared library that is not built by default. It is versioned with the core system but its API is younger and correspondingly less settled.