This set of tutorials is going to follow the Python TCOD tutorial, but will be written in Common Lisp and use the BearLibTerminal library.
This tutorial assumes you are familiar with programming in Common Lisp. If you’re not familiar, I would highly recommend checking out A Road to Common Lisp on Steve Losh’s blog. It provides many valuable resources to get up to speed with Common Lisp, and is how I got started.
You will need the following installed:
I run Linux (Fedora) on my machine, and SBCL is available in the default repositories. If it is not available in your distro (or if you’re not running Linux), check out the getting started page.
Quicklisp should be configured based on the installation guide on their home page.
For the Emacs configuration, the most important peice is to have a REPL available. I use the sly package, although SLIME is popular as well. Having a REPL running in your editor makes the development process much more efficient and enjoyable.
Once you have everything installed that you need, you can get the project skeleton created, with the needed dependencies. Since you have Quicklisp installed, it will be easy to generate a project skeleton using Quickproject.
First, open emacs and start your REPL (if you’re using sly, the Emacs command is just M-x “sly”). In the REPL:
(ql:quickload :quickproject)
(quickproject:make-project #p"cl-rltut" :depends-on '(:cl-blt))
That should create a “cl-rltut” directory within the current working directory of your REPL (this can be shown for sly with the “sly-pwd” command, and changed with the “sly-cd” command). Within the project directory, you should see an ASDF file named “cl-rltut.asd”, which looks like the following:
(asdf:defsystem #:cl-rltut
:description "Describe cl-rltut here"
:author "Nick Forrer"
:license "MIT"
:version "0.0.1"
:serial t
:depends-on (#:cl-blt)
:components ((:file "package")
(:file "cl-rltut")))
You will also need to download the cl-blt package, which contains the Common Lisp bindings for BearLibTerminal. The reason for this is because cl-blt is not currently available in an online repository that Quicklisp could download it automatically. Download the package using:
git clone https://github.com/sjl/cl-blt.git ~/quicklisp/local-projects/cl-blt
That will clone the cl-blt Git repo into a directory that Quicklisp will look at when trying to load an ASDF system. For reference, the latest commit on the cl-blt repository is `ee69ac7bfb473e9cdd8c2d50d45ef288ef315ff3` at the time of writing. If you want to guarantee you’re using the same version as I am, just make sure you checkout that commit.
In addition to the Common Lisp bindings, you will also need the BearLibTerminal library itself. Download the appropriate binary for your system from http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal#download. Once downloaded, extract the archive and find the shared library dependency. For the Linux archive, this will be Linux64/libBearLibTerminal.so (assuming you are using a 64-bit OS). This file should be placed in a “lib” directory in the root of your project.
NOTE: Windows users may need to add the following to their package.lisp file, to ensure the bearlibterminal library is found:
(cffi:define-foreign-library blt:bearlibterminal
(t "lib/BearLibTerminal.dll"))
(cffi:use-foreign-library blt:bearlibterminal)
To make it easier to load your project from the REPL, you can create a symlink in the local-projects directly that points to your project, so that Quicklisp can always find it (use the correct path to your project instead of ~/src/lisp/cl-rltut):
ln -s ~/src/lisp/cl-rltut ~/quicklisp/local-projects
With all of that in place, you should now be able to load your projects system in the REPL to ensure in can find all the dependencies with:
(ql:quickload :cl-rltut)
Assuming you don’t see any errors, then your project is all set to continue with the tutorial! To see what the project should look like at this point, you can find the current state for Part 0 here: https://github.com/nwforrer/cl-rltut/tree/part-0.
If you run into any issues, or have questions/feedback, please open an issue on this blogs GitHub repository.
Continue to the next tutorial.