[Ecls-list] ECL and commercial apps

[Julian Stecklina]

On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 12:08:43 +0000
joel reymont <joelr1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> I'm considering ECL to build commercial poker room software. The
> software will be closed-source.

What is poker room software?

> One of the things that I'll be doing is integrating it with the Torque
> Game Engine (http://www.garagegames.com) so that Torque can be
> programmed in Lisp instead of its built-in C-like language. This will
> require embedding ECL in Torque, most likely as a shared library.

This will probably work. At least ECL works as plugin to X-Chat. 

> Is ECL ready for production use and do I need to pay special attention
> to any licensing bits?

As far as I interpret it, ECL is under the LGPL. That means that you can
use it for your (closed-source) application, as long as you share every
modification you made to ECL itself.

But to answer your original question: ECL is great for extending
existing C-based code to support scripting. It is a lot more fun to
interface to C from ECL than from any other Lisp I know. But
documentation is a bit scarce. If it is "production-quality" depends on
your definition. If it includes lots of documentation and a huge user
base, probably not. There is still a lot of widespread Common Lisp
libraries waiting to be ported to or tested on ECL, too.

> I develop on Mac OSX and will be deploying on Windows, Mac OSX and
> Linux.

ECL runs on all of them as far as I know (I only use FreeBSD, though).

Regards,
-- 
                    ____________________________
 Julian Stecklina  /  _________________________/
  ________________/  /
  \_________________/  LISP - truly beautiful