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Comment by skocznymroczny | Hacker News Reader

This looks like it could be fun. I don't know Lisp, but I might be willing to learn one just for this jam. Can someone recommend a Lisp version that works on Windows and is easy to setup? Simple 2D graphics like SDL will be enough for me.

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I'm biased but I'd go Common Lisp

The basics:

- SBCL: generates fast[0] code. runs well on windows

- Quicklisp: The package manager which lets you install the packages mentioned below

I've got a video here that should help with getting set up on windows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnWVu8VVDbI&t=1s

Then you could try the SDL2 approach:

- cl-sdl2: Bindings over sdl2 https://github.com/lispgames/cl-sdl2

- cl-sdl2-mixer: audio playback https://github.com/lispgames/cl-sdl2-mixer

- Some basic math library like: 3d-matrices, rtg-math, sb-cga

Or maybe an existing engine:

- https://github.com/borodust/trivial-gamekit

Come down to #lispgames on freenode if you need a hand as there is usually someone there who has touched this stuff[1]

I'll also pimp my own stuff while I'm here just in case someone is looking for a lispy layer over gl

- https://github.com/cbaggers/cepl

Main downside of Common Lisp is that Emacs or Vim are pretty much a requirement to get a nice development environment, without which you are pretty much in 'writing Java in notepad' territory.

[0] for some definition of fast that I don't want to belabor this comment with.

To get started quickly with SBCL/Quicklisp/Emacs/Slime on Windows:

https://common-lisp.net/project/lispbox/

http://www.iqool.de/lispstick.html

Lispbox is very old (though worked good enough at the days; I actually started with it). The current "Lisp environment in a box" thing is Portacle - https://portacle.github.io/.

I couldn't get anywhere with those last time I tried (2013). LispStick doesn't seem to have been updated since 2014 and LispBox has had no commits since 2010. Have you used either of these recently? For those wanting to go this route I'd recommend Portacle which can run on off a usb and includes git

Thanks. I haven't used windows for development in years and was not aware they went stale.

I tried atom-slime and it worked pretty well. But, the community generally uses either vim or emacs: Oni might work, since it’s just an electron wrapper around neovim

there’s lispbuilder-sdl which I was one of the founders of years ago, although it maybe suffering from bit rot these days

https://github.com/lispbuilder/lispbuilder

To toot baggers' horn, he has a great video series where he does game development in lisp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82o5NeyZtvw&list=PL2VAYZE_4w...

Racket and clojure being already cited, there is also LambdaNative which is a scheme specifically for developing cross platform applications (it's based on gambit scheme). it has a binding for opengl and a GUI built with that binding.

http://www.lambdanative.org/

Already an example game in LambdaNative: https://github.com/part-cw/lambdanative/blob/master/apps/uSq.... Compile it and run it, or get it from the App stores

See here for Lisp resources:

https://github.com/lispgames/lispgames.github.io/wiki/Common...

Wow, the amount of [STALLED] or [ABANDONED] tags on that list sure was depressing.

Why that? People write a lot of experimental code. There is nothing wrong with that. One could remove them from the list, but the state is documented and you can choose to use them or not. Note also that the language does not change too much, so relatively old libraries might still work - the surrounding platform changes faster and is probably more of the actual limitation.

Take a look at racket (https://racket-lang.org/), works on windows and is the most beginner-friendly lisp I know.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/games/index.html

Also has bundled bindings for OpenGL and other GUI stuff. You can find more there: https://docs.racket-lang.org/index.html

Huh, cool. I like that they provide a module for traditional card games

https://docs.racket-lang.org/cards/index.html

I'd recommend Fennel and Love2D, if you're ok with picking up a bit of Lua, or if you already know it.

I would suggest SBCL if you're going with Common Lisp, although Clojure + libgdx could be an interesting combination.

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