cffi VS love

When you want to do anything that breaks the nice bubble of your Lisp image, you might want to know a bit about your operating system's programming interface. This will come in handy if you ever need to wrap a library with CFFI. There are some things that are pretty inconvenient as a rule (like dealing with any protocol that uses network byte order), but if you stay within the bubble of your Lisp image, you won't really notice them.

I'm just posting the work that I have done over the last year or so on CL-Objc. I'm still blocked from better support (e.g., passing structs by value for frameworks like UIKit). I just wanted to post what I have done online for others interested in the work or motivated to collaborate on this.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I have been waiting on some feedback for PR in CFFI. This feature is blocking me from reviving CL-OBJC. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Is that actually https://github.com/cffi/cffi/commit/33970351e71bb5f12ba56fc40270089e948ae112 ? I.e. after loading cl+ssl. (Although Hunchentoot does not interrupt threads)

Maybe access the pins using CFFI, https://github.com/cffi/cffi package and one the libraries mentioned here? https://www.bigmessowires.com/2018/05/26/raspberry-pi-gpio-programming-in-c/

FTR, on my system QL fetches CFFI 0.23.0 and the fix/error I'm talking about is https://github.com/cffi/cffi/blob/master/src/libraries.lisp#L106 and seems to have been added iin this PR https://github.com/cffi/cffi/pull/173/commits/263b38f4f2600dbacde8f2b313620c35a563c6df so the fix should be in CFFI 0.24.0 released 24 March 2021.

FTR: this is the PR https://github.com/cffi/cffi/pull/173/commits/263b38f4f2600dbacde8f2b313620c35a563c6df

C: Alternatively (more difficult) you could try to wrap the underlying C layers of either of those mentioned under Python with CFFI. The C-based game engine, Raylib, is also wrappable this way. I finished a super cool walking simulator in CL with that, but it is more tedious than the others since raylib is really barebones.

I feel inspired to start Lisp after being disappointed with the "open" source scene of 2021. I'd rather pay LispWorks a yearly fee and be left alone than dealing with unbalanced people in the Python space. The free Lisp implementations also look somewhat isolated from the ideological wars.

However, a C interface is required. Is this one the recommended solution? Is it really portable?

https://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/

What is the speed compared to a Python C extension? Are implementation-specific C interfaces faster (I guess they are)?

Sorry for so many questions, but these can usually only be answered by people who have actually used the interface.

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

* When a cell is born it randomly takes on the color of one of its (3) parents.

To try it out:

1. Install LÖVE for your device from https://love2d.org (~5MB and open source). (iOS requires building from source on a Mac, or installing the third-party Love2D Studio: https://love2d-studio.marknoteapp.com)

2. Install my Lua Carousel from https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel (~100KB). It includes all its source code and can be edited live on a computer as it runs.

3. Copy the ~100 lines of code from the bottom of https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-after-9-days and paste them into Lua Carousel.

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience