Re: Curses alternative for Lisp?

grue@xxxxxxx (Timofei Shatrov) writes:

(check out curses.lisp; it also contains some bloat such as REPL
implementation; oh, there is also a whole game that uses the library)

Ouch! I sense a lack, or maybe I'm into unidiomatic territory.

I don't see how Lisp is different from C in this case. In either case
you have to call some external library. The fact that curses
implementations are written in C doesn't matter. This is extremely
low-level OS-specific stuff, and perhaps C is the best language to
implement that stuff in. Once you have FFI bindings, curses is just as
easy and natural to use in Lisp as in C.

If you have to use FFI it usually means two things. First you've
encountered one of the things that Lisp lack, like a standard socket
library, or second that you are trying to do things the C way and not the
Lisp way. If during all these years nobody have made any terminal
handling library I'm beginning to think I'm onto case two.

As it is low-level stuff I guess FFI is the way to go, but I'm beginning
to wonder how lispers do their (G)UI programming anyway.

/Andreas

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