[cells-devel] whoa, porters!!

[Kenny Tilton]

Just killed about six hours on this: app ran fine when I built using the 
ACL project manager. Then I built with ASDF just to confirm the ASD 
files were complete. Suddenly the demo (the lighting panel) looked black 
and white, tho yellow check marks still appeared yellow.

Quite a few hours into the show I discover the light positioner, if 
clicked, starts to bring things back to normal. But it starts as if it 
were uninitialized. Also, a few more clicks like this and we lose the 
whole IDE.

Finally at hour six one of the monkeys accidentally changes the:

   (declaim (optimize...)

at the top of the asd files to match the project manager defaults, and 
we are back in business. Under ACL/win32, that is, with 
less-than-optimal optimize settings. Which tells me...

I got serious FFI declaration issues. I have been aware for some time 
that ACL can be very forgiving in this regard, and now I am guessing 
that goes away as the speed optimization gets cranked. So the good news 
is that I just need to crank the settings and then I should be able to 
debug my ffi work within ACL, my strongest environment.

The upshot for porters is that their compilers may not be as helpful as 
ACL's, even with the safest and slowest settings. In fact, maybe I 
should test under Lispworks. That consistently broke on things ACL could 
handle, but it always turned out ACL had been letting me get away with 
murder.

Well, ACL /is/ my strongest platform, and I have found a way it seems to 
make it less forgiving, so I may as well stay here until it all works 
with the toughest of settings, then see if LW is any less forgiving.

There is no harm in trying if you manage to get a clean build and shared 
libs loaded and callbacks from C into Lisp working, but if the lighting 
panel comes up black and white (no apparent shading) and no spinning 
object (teapot)--bingo. btw, that apparent b&W is just bogus values for 
the ambience for the light. ambience is even lighting across a scene, so 
wicked bright ambience brings everything into high contrast.

I will shortly put up CelloGlut.zip with this issue unresolved. The 
optimizations in the source /have/ been eased to make AllegroCL work 
when built via ASDF, but what your compiler does with what I am guessing 
is bad FFI work may still break things.

kt

-- 
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