Bill St Clair
Hacking Personal Projects at Self-employed
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBill St Clair is a veteran Lisp hacker with 18+ years of deep systems and language-level experience, now focused on personal projects in Elm and web clients. He spent decades improving Clozure Common Lisp internals—concurrency, runtime, and platform-specific robustness—and has a track record of shipping low-level fixes that reflect strong systems thinking. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, he now builds Wilfred (a web Slime client) and Mammudeck (a multi-column Mastodon client), blending language runtime expertise with modern front-end tooling. His background includes early work on Macintosh Common Lisp, Apple Dylan, and high-performance computing tools at Thinking Machines, giving him rare cross-generational perspective on language design and implementation. An MIT-trained mathematician, Bill pairs rigorous theoretical grounding with a playful curiosity—he’s also an Elm enthusiast, trombone player, and outdoor devotee who pursues micro-projects that catch his fancy.
18 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics, 4.9/5.0, Bachelor’s Degree, Mathematics, 4.9/5.0 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
English, German
Stackoverflow
31reputation
9kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (14)
locking10
compiler10
locks10
compiler-compiler10
common-lisp10
concurrency10
compiler-development10
x868
architectures7
lisp7
architecture7
arm7
ios6
iphone6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
Clozure/ccl
Dec 2010 - Jan 2019
Clozure Common Lisp
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits, 1 push, 4 comments in 8 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Bill's contributions focus on enhancing the Clozure Common Lisp (CCL) compiler and runtime environment. They've made several critical changes related to concurrency and locking mechanisms, specifically refining the `with-read-lock` and `with-write-lock` macros, as well as modifying futex values to prevent type errors. Additionally, the user has worked on platform-specific issues, such as ensuring `open-shared-library` works correctly on FreeBSD and fixing vector handling during fasl dumping and loading. These changes indicate a deep understanding of the CCL internal workings and system-level programming.
clozurecompilerlispcclcommon-lisp
billstclair/cl-crypto
Nov 2010 - May 2013
Contributions:18 commits in 2 years 5 months
cryptographylispspecscrypto
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.