Not quite there yet

Lately I have been looking for a gui library for Common Lisp that I could easily integrate with PAL to implement level editors and other kinds of little tools.

Most obvious candidates were Ltk, Lambda-GTK (seems to be the most stable of the GTK bindings for CL), McCLIM and Garnet. After some experimentation it turned out that all of them lacked some features that I would need; most importantly good support for loading and displaying various image formats and a way to integrate the gui’s mainloop with my own (no threading since I’m stuck on Windows here). Which is too bad since McCLIM and Garnet both offer a very interesting take on the user interface design and at least McCLIM seems work fine in Win32 with XMing.
I also tried the IUP toolkit which is very easy to bind with but eventually I lost interested in it since it didn’t actually fit my needs. If somebody out there is interested in writing a CL interface to a portable gui toolkit it could be worth a look.

So, while chanting the magic mantra* I set out to spend some of my copius free time to write yet another game oriented OpenGL gui toolkit. And while it is still very much in its infancy it has been been a quite fun, frustrating and rewarding process that I’ll post more details about later.