Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: GNU Arch - was patches

[root]

> Just as a friendly suggestion over the back garden fence, rather than
> trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by making Axiom X based on
> Windows, wouldn't your time (as a well regarded highly productive and
> uncommonly competent lisp programmer) be better spent either:
> 
>    i) picking up on the LTK GUI project which stands a very good chance
> of being portable across many platforma and CL compilers with very
> little effort from someone like yourself, or

I did some work with LTK. In fact, my son maintained a branch of that
effort for a while. I spent some time trying to get it to work without
success. (This was reported on the mailing list somewhere).

I also recently tried xgcl-2 which is packaged with GCL. It failed.
But it appears that Camm has recently put some work into it and I
might try again.

> 
>    ii) for much more work but in the long term probably more rewarding,
> porting CFFI to GCL and thence an industrial strength GUI binding like
> wxCL based on the highly portable wxWidgets library.

I'm a member of the lisp-gardener's project and have been pursuing this
strategy. Unfortunately UFFI isn't universal. CFFI also isn't. FFI
works in clisp thus:

(use-package "FFI")
(def-call-out clip-open
          (:name "OpenClipboard") (:library "user32.dll")
              (:arguments (hwnd uint))
              (:return-type int)
              (:language :stdc))
                  
but clisp is ansi and I can't get there yet. (Ansi lisp is another
subproject that is not yet ready for prime time.)

I've also spent time trying to get McClim to run. And an effort to use
the browser as a front-end (AJAX-based). And a side-effort thru Ron
Avitzur to consider using his graphing tool instead.

So far I have succeeded in making the X-based browser run standalone
on a windows platform. I'm looking at getting the graphics to work
but so far no luck. If those two can be made to run then I just have
to get sman to talk to all of the parts and a full axiom will be
available on windows.

These are hard problems (at least for me) and it all takes time.

Tim