ECL stands for Embeddable Common-Lisp. The ECL project is an effort to
modernize Giuseppe Attardi's ECL environment to produce an implementation of
the Common-Lisp language which complies to the ANSI X3J13 definition of the
language.

The current ECL implementation features:
  * A bytecodes compiler and interpreter.
  * A translator to C.
  * An interface to foreign functions.
  * A dynamic loader.
  * The possibility to build standalone executables and shared libraries.
  * The Common-Lisp Object System (CLOS).
  * Most of the Meta Object Protocol (MOP).
  * Conditions and restarts for handling errors.
  * Sockets as ordinary streams.
  * The Gnu Multiprecision library for fast bignum operations.
  * A simple conservative mark & sweep garbage collector.
  * The Boehm-Weiser garbage collector.
  * Object finalizers, weak references and weak hash tables.
  * Threads using the POSIX threads library (with optional TLS).
  * CLX, an X11 client not needing extra X11 libraries.
  * Unicode.
