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I have to agree. I am using SBCL for all of my Common Lisp work and highly appreciate it. I am able to fulfil my graphical tooling needs with LTk, but I think S

by _ph_ 7y ago

I have to agree. I am using SBCL for all of my Common Lisp work and highly appreciate it. I am able to fulfil my graphical tooling needs with LTk, but I think SBCL would have gained by officially adopting one of the available UI libraries and consequently offering more GUI tools out of the box. But being as it is, it is easy to load a GUI library of your choice and as a Lisp implementation SBCL is just great.

p_l 7y ago
SBCL purposefully dropped many "extra" libraries that were part of CMU (including GUI library) in order to focus on the lisp implementation itself. Given that the "missing" libraries are recouped by often better external code these days, I find it a pretty good option. Unfortunately probably nobody has time to work on LW-level GUI library. Significant effort involved from people who mostly have no need for one.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  You are probably talking about clx. When talking about GUI libraries, I was more thinking about high-level libraries, which for example bind to Gtk, Qt or Tk. There are plenty of those libraries, and that is good. But I would have liked, if the SBCL maintainers had worked together with one of the maintainers of those libraries with the goal of eventually distributing it with SBCL. So there would be a default library to target when developing tools like e.g. a graphical debugger. Today, quicklist solves a lot of dependency problems, but having an "official" GUI library could have stimulated development of more UI tools around SBCL.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    CMUCL also has bindings to Motif, tools like the debugger and inspector use this.