Monday, February 21

CL-Ncurses

I was playing with this at the weekend. And it's a nice solution for whipping up testbeds for simulations that can get away with a simple text interface. The trouble is it needs a bit of work, and the maintainer has dissapeared...

I'd really like to submit a patch but there doesn't seem to be any point. I wish there was some kind of policy on common-lisp.net for dealing with such orphaned projects. The same as with sourceforge, I guess.

Monday, February 14

LISP Software Renderer RIP

I gave up on my quest to write a software renderer in Lisp - I got as far as creating nice antialiased clipped lines, but was driven to the conclusion that the only sane language for such a beast is assembler...even C doesn't get quite close enough to the metal without generous helpings of inline assembler - which kind of misses the point..



I did discover that a LISP compiler with a decent static type system, vectorisation, SSE/SIMD support, and inline assembler could do just about as good a job as C. Trouble is, there's no LISP system like that in existence. There's at least two good open source Lisps that could be persuaded to do it, though..