Progress update
October 4, 2009
cl-gtk2 is becoming more portable. I’ve added support for Microft Windows and Clozure CL. Several other popular lisp implementations are not yet supported: clisp, ecl, abcl.
SBCL on windows is unithreaded only. I haven’t been able to make cl-gtk2 work if SBCL is started from SLIME (however, I haven’t tried very hard), but running from command-line works. And SBCL is experiencing some rare crashes.
Clozure CL had a bug with its CLOS MOP implementation that had only been fixed today. In order to run cl-gtk2 under Clozure, you need to have Clozure from SVN (revision 12905 or newer). Clozure works fine on windows, has threads and is quite fast. This makes CCL more useful for development or installing on Windows. But I haven’t yet added support for saving Lisp images with Clozure.UPD:Support for saving images with CCL has been added.
Using shared libraries seems more fragile on Windows (SBCL on Windows does not tolerate missing symbols like it does on Linux), and Gtk+-2.16 is a requirement for cl-gtk2.
Some obligatory screenshots: a simple text editor and rotating OpenGL teapot.
October 4, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Dmitry,
It’s excellent to hear that CL-GTK2 is becoming more portable. You committed something to github about an embedded UI specification language. I assume this is the beginning of the “high-level api for user interface specification” you describe on the project page. I would love to hear more about it when you get a chance or feel it has stabilized.
October 5, 2009 at 4:46 am
I will certainly write about it. Here is a short description of this mini-language: http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-gtk2/doc/gtk/Gtk_002b-Embedded-UI-Mini_002dlanguage.html
October 5, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Great job. Looks good!
October 5, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Good work, but i’m afraid this is work with few takers.
GTK2 is an abomination for a cross-platform toolkit and i wouldn’t touch a windows GTK application with a ten foot pole.
October 6, 2009 at 4:33 am
I can’t agree. Gtk+ is pretty nice UI library. What makes you avoid using Gtk+ applications on Windows?
And what are other options? The only one that I know is Qt. But Qt is C++ library which makes FFI _very_ hard and has several design “issues”.
Writing native Lisp GUI toolkit is impractical at this moment.