[clx-devel] [cffi-devel] trivial-features, CLX and SBCL mutual incompatibility

[Cyrus Harmon]

I think the CLX maintainer who objects to modifying CLX to play nice with a lisp implementation that defines :little-endian and doesn't accept old-school eval-when conditions is unlikely to think that this is a step in the right direction.

Cyrus

On Feb 23, 2011, at 10:44 AM, Luís Oliveira wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Cyrus Harmon <ch-lisp at bobobeach.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Forgive me if you've heard me rant about this before, but there is a mutual incompatibility between CLX, trivial-features (which, for me at least, gets pulled in whenever I try to use CFFI) and SBCL. The problem is that trivial-features puts :little-endian on *features* and CLX has the following code in defdeps.lisp:
>> 
>> #+(or lispm vax little-endian Minima)
>> (eval-when (eval compile load)
>>  (pushnew :clx-little-endian *features*))
> 
> trivial-features is a bit impolite about pushing :little-endian to
> *features*. In my defense, one of the design goals of trivial-features
> is to effortlessly disappear over time. I.e., at some point in the
> future Lisps will have agreed on what keywords to use, and
> trivial-features will be a no-op or removed altogether without changes
> to code that uses it. As such, my decision was to use the same
> keywords that are in widespread use and make minimal adjustments to
> provide consistency across Lisps.
> 
> Perhaps if we can sneak a :little/big-endian feature into SBCL proper,
> the CLX fix will become inevitable and we'll be a tiny bit closer to
> achieving trivial-features' goal? :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> Luís Oliveira
> http://r42.eu/~luis/