The Battle for CL-GD on Windows.

To use graphical tools to display output from my Lisp programs running on Windows. Should I expect to be able to do this?

  1. SBCL does not have the fragile port message it used to have.
  2. quicklisp works on Windows
  3. The Common Lisp standardization is 39 years old and, the ANSI standard is 29 years old.
  4. Most of the Unix tools have been ported to Windows this is represented by the mingw64 effort.
  5. There are good FFI systems that work on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

It is a common complaint in some online Lisp groups that some are frustrated with the lack of Foreign Library access in Common Lisp. However, the implementations are old, conceived, and maintained under Linux-only considerations, and the problems continue to propagate.

The largest problems are with Shared Libraries that require glue code. The example I am using is CL-GD. Libgl has Linux, Mac, and Windows native C versions. The cl-gd was authored by Edi Weitz.

cl-gd  cross-platform-failure  cross-platform-lisp