[Ecls-list] ECL and shared libraries

[Erik Winkels]

Quoting Paul Meurer, Fri 27 Aug 2004 13:47:50 +0200:
>
> after some searching for a Common Lisp that could be embedded into a
> shared library I came across ECL as the only promising candidate
> (besides ACL). But after having read the relevant posts to the list,
> my impression is that nobody really has done that with ECL.
>
> Is my impression right? What about the Qake plugin? How was that
> done?

The Quake plugin was done more than a year ago as a proof of concept
by someone (me :-) inexperienced in both ECL and Common Lisp.

The results were encouraging but I never spent much time on it after
the initial weekend.  (Though I've been planning on spending some more
time on it, wrapping it up and releasing it.  Too much Java and JBoss
during the working hours have been draining the life out of me for a
while now though :( )

Anyway, initially I wanted to be able to use a little C as possible
and steer a bot (AI controlled multiplayer character) with calls to C
functions from ECL.  I never figured out how to do that using ECL's
FFI.

If I wrap the project up now I'll createenough wrappers in C using
ECL's cl_def_c_function to steer a bot and call those from ECL.  This
results in quite a loss in dynamism (the right word?) and doesn't make
me particularly happy, but should still be fun to play with.

I can send you the current source if you want to  but you're better
off checking some more recent projects or the X-Chat plugin.


cheers,
Erik.