c-mera VS cl-autowrap

Arguably Pacman Clone - it uses WISP (non s-exps syntax for any lisp) + C-Mera which is some kind of mix of C and CL, and is written mostly in CL.

c-mera does exist.

Thanks, you're right. I chose JS because it is so well-known, but I think it does have some other advantages as well. For example, if you need to run a lot of compatibility test commands, or need to generate code via external programs, or even make network requests to get config values or something, you can do all of that in parallel with JS async instead of sequentially like configure. You might find https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera interesting. It's similar to this project but uses Lisp and a unified syntax.

I used https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera for this purpose and it worked very well.

That's a Lisp preprocessor for a non-Lisp language.

If you program in C using the Common Lisp c-mera preprocessor, or any of the other similar systems, it's the same thing.

You're writing everything in S-exps, and the expansions use conses, but the output is C; so that of course cannot call cons at run time.

https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera

even more interesting are the handful of projects layering lisp style macros on top of C. i've seen several go by over the years; a quick google search brought up c-mera and cmacro.

If you look for lisp-like syntax in C: - cmera https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera

> Lack of access to the C libraries.

???

I recently started learning Common Lisp for fun (and fun it is!) and the ease of accessing C libraries was one of the things that surprised me in a positive way.

Using https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap one can simply write (c-include "file.h") and the API defined in "file.h" is accessible from Lisp. I can't think of a simpler way.

Even without cl-autowrap, FFI using https://cffi.common-lisp.dev/ seems simple enough.

I think the closest is cl-autowrap. I can imagine a higher level wrapper around it by which it can translate the python header file into the CL counterpart, although I'm not sure how much work the translation might entail. Also, because python and lisp semantics can differ considerably, the generated code might be trying to do weird things - again an issue of translation.

Common lisp has a "pretty OK" story for calling C code whenever some speed is needed [0,1]. In my opinion, they suffer from some of the documentation/quick start problems that common lisp has, but they're otherwise usable.

Some of Naughty Dog's late 90's/early 2000's games (Jak and Daxter, Jak II) were written in a lisp called GOAL, Game Oriented Assembly Lisp [2]

[0] https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap

The closest thing to what you request, that I'm aware of, is cl-autowrap (to use C code from Lisp) but it is not standard in any way. CFFI is the de facto standard for using C from Lisp across different implementations.

:claw tracks back to 2017 as a fork of cl-autowrap with cl-autowrap/pull/83 feature.

If you're interested in FFI, then yeah CFFI is the standard. The other comments addressed speed, I also wanted to point out https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap which is built on top of CFFI and can help get a wrapper up and running faster. After using autowrap's c-include you can then use CFFI basically like normal or some useful autowrap/plus-c's helper functions -- e.g. in one project, I have an SDL_Event (https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_Event) and to access event.key.keysym.scancode I have a helper function that's just (plus-c:c-ref event sdl2-ffi:sdl-event :key :keysym :scancode). Last year I wanted to try out using FMOD, and even though it's closed source and has a (to me) "interesting" API things worked easily: https://gist.github.com/Jach/dc2ec7b9402d0ec5836a935384cacdc... More work would be needed to make a nice wrapper, type things more fully, etc. but depending on the C library you might find someone's already done that (or made a start) and made it available from quicklisp.

In recent years there has also been cl-autowrap; caveats -

There is the cl-autowrap that can generate lisp packages from C header filesc- I am unsure if it sticks to ANSI C or goes beyond. It inturn depends on c2ffi for the first time around.