[Sending a copy to the mailing list. Maybe someone here has more to say about it.]
On Thu, 7 Sep 2006 11:48:07 +0200, "Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll" juanjose.garciaripoll@googlemail.com wrote:
Do you think it is doable? Or is the package too Windows specific.
The main point of the DLL which is delivered with RDNZL and which is kind of a bridge between Lisp and .NET is the fact that it mixes what Microsoft calls "managed" and "unmanaged" code. Roughly, from the Lisp side it looks like plain old C code, and from the .NET side it looks like, well, .NET code.
AFAIU (but I'm not 100% sure), this can only be done with Microsoft's C++, and not, e.g., with their C# or one of their other .NET languages. There's surely /some/ way to do that with Mono because Mono is open source and you'll be able to tweak it somehow. However, I have no idea how to do that (and no time to do it as well).
I think that at least this shared library must be replaced. Everything in the Lisp code itself which might be Windows-specific shouldn't be too hard to port.
Also, I don't know much about Mono, so I can't estimate how useful a Mono port would be. The good thing about RDNZL on Windows is that you have access to the whole operating system including all the GUI stuff. I guess this is not necessarily the case with Mono.
HTH, Edi.