Would you consider helping to test just one new library for Common Lisp? What if the same help would add about a hundred mature and stable libraries to Common Lisp in one stroke? Yes, I am pitching something here...
The Python-On-Lisp gardeners project has been making steady progress, and is at the point now where it needs some fresh eyes to shake out the last compatibility issues which prevent if from being brain dead easy to use. Jeremy Smith started this project a few months ago. Python has many stable and easy-to-use standard libraries, which some believe CL lacks. Python has also been designed for easy embedding. Python-on-lisp lets you access all the Python libraries directly from Common Lisp. Jeremy's original version worked on Windows in CLisp, Allegro, and LispWorks, but the code still required some manual configuration to setup. Since then, I have worked with Jeremy (and with help from Gary King) to make python-on-lisp asdf-installable. To use python-on-lisp now, all you need to do is asdf-install its tarball. This will automatically install and load CFFI as needed, and find your copy of Python. That's the idea. But we've reached the point where we need help to fix the last few issues standing in the way of this nirvana of cross-language compatibilty. This is what remains: 1) tweaking the single (CFFI:DEFINE-FOREIGH-LIBRARY ...) form so that it automatically finds Python for the main Linux distributions. OS X and Windows seem to work fine, but we don't understand some crucial subtleties in how Linux stores its shared object libraries. We're aiming for Debian first, then Ubuntu and Red Hat. 2) testing and tweaking for compatibility with other CL implementations. SBCL and CMUCL are presenting problems which are mysterious to us, but probably transparent to someone familiar with CFFI. We're stuck, but we think it's a simple issue (a foreign string pointer is being converted to a CL string prematurely, but we can't figure out why). The asdf tarball for python-on-lisp is here: http://common-lisp.net/project/python-on-lisp/pythononlisp.tar.gz . If you've got a minute, please give it a spin. cheers, Alexis & Jeremy _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
