In anticipation of needing a simple graphical drawing utility for the next batch of SICP exercises, I fired up Google to find out what Common Lisp provides in terms of GUI libraries for Windows. Not much, it appears - at least not for the free CL implementations (like CLISP, which I’m using).

After a few misfires, I finally managed to get wxCL to work, kinda. In order to sort out the “kinda” I want to understand in some depth how wxCL actually works, and this sets me on a long educational path:

1. In order to understand wxCL, I must understand CFFI
2. In order to understand CFFI, I must understand ASDF.
3. In order to understand ASDF I must learn about:
   1. How CL packages work
   2. How CL pathnames work

Quite a quest, at the end of which I hope to report full success I think that a good understanding of these topics is essential for industrial strength CL programming.

Update: it also wouldn’t hurt to understand exactly how the memory images of CLISP work. I think this can be useful for easily adding common packages (like ASDF) into CLISP and improving loading performances of large packages like CFFI.

No related posts.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Lisp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.