Eli Bendersky's website 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:
- In order to understand wxCL, I must understand CFFI
- In order to understand CFFI, I must understand ASDF.
- In order to understand ASDF I must learn about:
- How CL packages work
- 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.