cl-autowrap VS chibi-scheme

> 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.

Your core point is absolutely true about how Lisp is special in that it usually provides a read procedure to turn a textual type into a native object that can be evaluated (this is a side effect of homoiconicity, so any homoiconic language will have this property too), but I have one additional nitpick to make ontop of yours:

> [...] eval can take any lisp object and evaluate it.

eval cannot be generalized to accepting any Lisp object, only specifically symbolic expressions (symbols, or lists (potentially nested) of symbols). I discovered this because I thought Chibi Scheme was throwing a warning for valid code[0] to inject a value into an expression for eval, but Marc helped me understand that the warning was correct, because Scheme only specifies what eval does for symbolic values.

[0] https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme/issues/902

I think a VM for a small, but highly abstract, language like Scheme might address the objections of the author(s) of this article. You might like Chibi-Scheme: https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme

Having said that, IMO, if you're having fun with uxn and its retro 8-bit aesthetic, by all means keep going with that.

I would also add [chibi scheme](https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme) to the C-embedded alternatives.

This one? https://github.com/ashinn/chibi-scheme I notice it's intended to be embedded in C, so it's not a perfect match.

Chibi-Scheme's definition is interesting: