Hello everyone,

As an exercise in learning more about programming, and to help with another project of mine, I want to learn how to write bindings for C in Common Lisp. I know enough about both languages to read and understand the functions, but I have never written bindings in either and only have used CFFI in Common Lisp. I tried reading over their codebase to learn more, but it being a huge project I keep getting caught up in different parts. I looked around online for tutorials on including C from scratch in Common Lisp, but can only find resources on using CFFI. I was curious if anyone here had any sources or pointers. Nothing insane, just a simple "hello world" for using a basic C function from CL.

Thank you.

If you don't want to use CFFI, then you have to use an implementation specific method. Which Common Lisp implementation are you using?

Disclaimer: I am merely a hobbyist, if I get terminology wrong it is an innocent mistake.

The short answer is: sbcl first, then likely others. The long answer requires some context. I am jumping back into programming after a few years break. I love Common Lisp, but the ecosystem and ANSI standard could be better. The main issue I kept running into was a lack of solid system programming libraries. Libraries like UIOP, OSICAT, etc. are all well and good, but always miss things I need. I started writing my own system programming library to fill this void, cl-os, however in the process found that all libraries like UIOP and OSICAT seem to largely just wrap around different CL implementations, which themselves use the actual C code needed to make calls like exec, execvp, etc. I am wanting to make a library that bypasses all of this madness and goes straight to using the C so we can get things like managing and interacting with processes in Common Lisp without having to use userland programs like ps to do so (i.e. if on OpenBSD you could just do (getpid) and on Unix can just do (exec) etc and not have to wrap every CL out there like UIOP does). I add this context to say, to start SBCL but eventually I would likely add others to make things more portable. I am just playing at the moment and could very well decide to use CFFI, but wanna see how working with C from scratch in CL feels first.

Okay, the SBCL manual has a chapter on this, with an example: http://www.sbcl.org/manual/index.htm...tion-Interface