[Gcl-devel] Using GCL for games development

[Erik Andersson]

I have been thinking about trying to make a game in common lisp (using
SDL) and after doing some research it seemed like GCL would be a good
choice being portable, fast and LGPL.

I have some troubles understanding the ffi mechanisms however. I haven't
seen it explicitly documented anywhere (or have I just missed it?) so I
have been trying to figure it out through google. I have downloaded the
OpenGL-bindings and pargcl as well as some KCL manual and read the info
file.

Clines and defentry allows me to call a foreign function as long as no
extra linking is required and I can call functions like strlen as well,
but how do I add extra libraries? I understand that si::faslink doesn't
work on most systems but I have seen something about make "EXPORTS=..."
and .data files but I'm not sure how to use it.

Another thing I'm wondering about is the future license of the project, is
it supposed to change GPL or is it going to remain LGPL? As far as I
understand it everything you would type into a GPL:d Lisp would have to be
GPL as well if it shouldn't break the license.

An odd thing I noticed while trying to figure out the ffi was that c files
where being compiled with -O6. I thought that gcc didn't use anything above
O3 and that O2 was usually faster (at least on athlons).

/Erik Andersson