[cells-gtk-devel] Lispworks Cells-Gtk2 Milestone

[Kenny Tilton]

OK, some small success making Vasilis Margioulas's Cells-Gtk for CLisp 
and Gtk2 portable:

Vasilis's original version has been removed from the Cells project CVS 
tree and installed (again, it seems) in the Cells-Gtk project here:

    http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/clisp-cgtk/?cvsroot=cells-gtk

As for the new UFFI-ized version, that is here:

   http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/root/?cvsroot=cells-gtk

That now works under AllegroCL and Lispworks on win32. The source as it 
stands as of this writing shows only one of the nine test panels Vasilis 
provided. The others can be brought into play by de-commenting them in 
test-gtk.lisp. (You cannot miss it.) They all might work in AllegroCL 
(they did before all the work to get Lispworks working), but under 
Lispworks who knows, this is where I stopped to share since a couple of 
people had offered to work on the Lispworks port.

The UFFI-ization was done weirdly, because I was hoping to keep it 
working under CLisp which is not supported by UFFI. So for a while I 
conditionalized the code for #+/-CLisp, and definitions were left as 
CLisp-y and translated to UFFI by macrology, instead of just globally 
editing everything to actually be UFFI code.

Now I think I want to fork UFFI into what will become a different 
portable FFI not necessarily backward-compatible with UFFI. I gather 
there has been talk of doing so for a while. I would add callbacks, 
CLisp, booleans, and some handy utilities I have developed for dealing 
with FF. This will include providing friendly wrappers which will, for 
native FFIs which do not do it automatically, translate between nil/t 
and 0/1, or nil and a null pointer.

Anyway, just do not freak out at the weird way the UFFI-ization went, I 
changed horses midstream and it shows.

Contributors are welcome, as always. In case you missed the incentive, 
here are four of the nine panels:

      http://common-lisp.net/project/cells-gtk/

Those shots come from Vasilis's original CLisp release, running on 
Linux. I would be especially interested if some brave soul wants to try 
building GTK2 under X11 on Mac OS/X and see if AllegroCL or Lispworks 
can run Cells-gtk over there as well. No reason other OS/X Lisps cannot 
try, but then I would expect more UFFI-ization issues to fall out.

If anyone does, screenshots as well as patches are of course welcome.

kenny

-- 
Cells? Cello? Celtik?: http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film