[elephant-devel] Elephant on Windows/SBCL?

[Elliott Slaughter]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 2:12 AM, Ian Eslick <eslick at media.mit.edu> wrote:
> Elephant should work with Allegro on Win 32, it was my original development
> platform for Elephant, although I haven't tried it in some time.  An earlier
> version of Elephant worked on Lispworks/Windows although I think I recall
> some problems with the latest version of the unstable tree.

Ok.

> My impression from the last time I tried it was that SBCL was insufficiently
> mature on Win32 to be a reasonable configuration to target.  Has this
> changed?  Is it getting more use?

I don't know exactly what qualifies as "more use", but I believe that
every SBCL release since about 1.0 builds cleanly on win32, and I
don't generally crash it in the sorts of things I work on... although
it isn't quite stable enough to remove the "Your Kitten of Death
awaits!" warning.

> I would check UFFI support first - for running with BDB that's likely to be
> the hairy part.  Replacing the sb-posix calls for Windows shouldn't be too
> hard as Robert mentions.  Threads aren't needed for simple apps; I'm
> assuming you aren't going to be running this under a lisp web server which
> seems to be the most common use of Elephant.

UFFI seems to load fine under SBCL/win32, although the test suite
fails at compiling gethostname.lisp. (I'm not sure if that is
significant or not... it looks like the tests also fail under
Allegro/win32, although not in the same way.)

My project is actually a video game where I am trying to use
persistence in the physical simulation. I don't know if Elephant is
actually fast enough to be used for this, but I have had some success
with ACache, so I'd like to try :-)

-- 
Elliott Slaughter

"Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere." -
Frank Herbert