[rdnzl-devel] Re: RDNZL and Mono

[Edi Weitz]

[Sending a copy to the mailing list.  Maybe someone here has more to
say about it.]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2006 11:48:07 +0200, "Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll" <juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Do you think it is doable? Or is the package too Windows specific.

The main point of the DLL which is delivered with RDNZL and which is
kind of a bridge between Lisp and .NET is the fact that it mixes what
Microsoft calls "managed" and "unmanaged" code.  Roughly, from the
Lisp side it looks like plain old C code, and from the .NET side it
looks like, well, .NET code.

AFAIU (but I'm not 100% sure), this can only be done with Microsoft's
C++, and not, e.g., with their C# or one of their other .NET
languages.  There's surely /some/ way to do that with Mono because
Mono is open source and you'll be able to tweak it somehow.  However,
I have no idea how to do that (and no time to do it as well).

I think that at least this shared library must be replaced.
Everything in the Lisp code itself which might be Windows-specific
shouldn't be too hard to port.

Also, I don't know much about Mono, so I can't estimate how useful a
Mono port would be.  The good thing about RDNZL on Windows is that you
have access to the whole operating system including all the GUI stuff.
I guess this is not necessarily the case with Mono.

HTH,
Edi.