It is developed by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science since 1985 and puts a strong focus on performance and scalability.
In addition to the open-source nature, powerful reasons for its popularity were the compatibility with the DEC-10 and Quintus Prolog de-facto standards, very good performance, and compact generated code.
[1] SICStus is an ISO-conforming Prolog implementation based on the Warren Abstract Machine, which has a strong focus on performance and stability.
Since release 4.3, SICStus also contains a JIT (just-in-time) compiler to native code, but currently has no multithreading or tabling support.
[1] The reference implementation of the logic programming language Gödel, that first appeared around 1992, was built on top of SICStus Prolog, employing a different syntax style.
[1] As of 16 Dec 2023, this article is derived in whole or in part from Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond, authored by Philipp Körner, Michael Leuschel, Joao Barbosa, Vitor Santos Costa, Veronica Dahl, Manuel V. Hermenegildo, Jose F. Morales, Jan Wielemaker, Daniel Diaz, Salvador Abreu, Giovanni Ciatto.