Cactus

The downfall of Soviet microprocessor technology and Lisp

8 February 2010 (programming lisp)

There used to be an old joke about Soviet high-tech, that the downfall of microelectronics technology in the Soviet Union was caused by the finished products not fitting through the factory gate.

I've discovered the exact same problem with Lisp the other day.

The last time I looked for a good binding of GTK+ for Lisp, I came out empty-handed, but now I've discovered a new project called CL-GTK2 that seems really promising. It installed without problems using ASDF-Install (which is, sadly, not a given for most other GTK+ bindings), and even comes with Cairo binding.

So the idea was to rewrite Goblin using Lisp, as an exercise and a test of CL-GTK2's usability. The first playable version, a straight rewrite of the original Python code, came out at about two hundred lines of code. Before making any wild refactorings and adding new features, I've decided to try creating a standalone executable using SBCL and cl-launch, following these instructions.

So it seems deploying standalone executables to end users is still not a realistic option. And no, web apps are not the answer. They may be answers, but to totally different questions.


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