Hey guys.
As a way to give back to Lisp community, I’ve made a template for the Common Lisp game. It allows you to pick a supported middleware library of your liking (liballegro, raylib or SDL2), includes barebones code to display FPS counter and contains an Github Action to build the binaries for Windows and Linux (MacOS support is underway). If you have any questions, ideas or bug reports, feel free to drop them in comments below or in the issues section on Github.
Have a nice jam y’all 😊
It's so pretty and sophisticated!
While I plan to keep studying your template, this is my own small brain splatter from the start of this jam: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite?=tilde.institute+70+312f7e73637265777...
What kinda ideas go into a template like yours?
Thank you!
I can see your code is quite interesting as well, since it intermixes C code with CL code. What kind of FFI package do you use to achieve that?
My template, on the other hand, just relies on existing bindings for three aforementioned libraries (all of which are based on the ol’ boring CFFI). The idea was to just make minimal project skeleton with choice of available C middleware libraries, with automated builds included — I kinda geek about CI pipelines and stuff 😅
Ah yeah I didn't put #-ecl(error "This is ECL only") in there yet. That's a day 1 thing ;p. I'm using the low level embeddable common lisp compiler sffi package, which is basically just this:
```
(ffi:clines "#include <stdio.h>")
(let ((some 0) (variables "!"))
(declare (:string variables) (:int some))
(ffi:c-progn (some variables)
"printf(\"%d %s\", #0++, #1);" ; ugh, yes, you have to ennumerate them in C
(print `(,some ,variables))))
;;(I should double check I got the string <-> automatic cstring thing right)
```
I have found that just using the ECL compiler (common lisp but it's just a C library) is more reliably portable than the c2ffi based cffi, which doesn't have a port to openbsd for example. So we are kind of opposite, in that yours preserves behaviours against many backends right? Whereas mine is just a minimally serviceable seat-of-the-pants.
Oh cool, I didn’t know ECL allows that. It is very resourceful CL implementation ineed ☺️
Well yes, my template tries to offer the same minimum functionality (that is black screen and FPS counter with custom font) on different backends, but surely they have some differences.
Having ultra-thin ECL-based skeleton is nice too 😊 I would argue that it would also be a notch faster than any CFFI-based solution.
