Re: [Gcl-devel] xgcl

[Michael Koehne]

Moin Camm Maguire,

> > I can see there is a xgcl in there.  Is anybody
> > using that?  I just peeked the makefile and the
> > readme, but it looks old. Interesting though.
> Yes, I'll cc this message to two xgcl users who might be able to
> comment better than I.  It would be great to just have xgcl support be
> activated via a loadable module in the standard build, IMHO.

  the xgcl-2 that is shipped with GCL has some flaws because of age.

  - it needs static linking of a complete set of interface defentry's
    and defconstant's to X and Xlib producing a large GCL binary.
  - string handling of this package is crufted and should be burried.
  
  1996 Richard Mann improved xgcl-2 by adding OpenGL function and by
  using GCL string's for string handling. Using Paul Viola's wrapper
  macors for Lucid's foreign-define and foreign-function was nice for
  platform interoperability, but is now obsfucation as Lucid is gone.

  At this time many Linux and BSD systems had been a.out - where dynamic
  linking in a way GCL did, was much easier. ELF was introduced to
  simplyfy dynamic linking, it did for Postgres and Perl - but was a
  shoot in our foot for GCL.

  I took both sources last year for a other try on native bindings for
  XLib and OpenGL. The current status is a clean up and integration of
  both sources, with the goal that both have to run their demo
  applications with the minimal change of package imports. A 2nd source
  is for wrapping defentry macros into using ELF for loading. Goal is
  a dynamic way of using full featured X and OpenGL from a relative
  small ansi-gcl+elf-loader core.

  Unfortunately noam.copyleft.de is down since friday - so I can not
  offer a download URL ;-( I need to poke the people at our uni again,
  and may have to search for an other host, if they dont move.

  The site is not small in terms of traffic - e.g. its hosting my OS/360
  Y2K and MVS Y2K source, object and patches - and it requires CGI::pWiki
  to be installed. File system size for the UML that was running noam
  is about 3GIG - if you are root at some university webserver and
  instantly want to offer some webspace ;-)
  
Bye Michael
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