Adventures with CLISP on Windows 1

Here are some notes taken during a quick session with CLISP.

I wanted to try prototyping a simple application with an RDBMS backend. Clisp doesn’t come with any RDBMS FFIs. So I started looking for one. I was hoping to use ODBC but my hopes were quickly dashed. Not a great deal of specific information to help a newbie get started.

Question 1: Why doesn’t CLISP come with ASDF bundled? I googled around but wasn’t able to get any information

Thankfully, googling for CLISP SQLITE turned up something useful – a Clisp-SQLite FFI. (SQLite is a small embeddable database)

curl -o clisp-sqlite_1.0.tar.gz 

http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~williasr/clisp-sqlite_1.0.tar.gz

curl -o sqlitedll.zip http://www.sqlite.org/sqlitedll-2_8_17.zip
tar zxf clisp-sqlite_1.0.tar.gz
unzip sqlitedll.zip

C:...> CLISP
[1]> (require  "clisp-sqlite_1.0/clisp-sqlite")
;; Loading file C:clisp-2.38clisp-sqlite_1.0clisp-sqlite.lisp ...
*** - FFI::FOREIGN-LIBRARY: Cannot open library "libsqlite.so"

Whoops, turned out the FFIs are hardwired to libsqlite.so.

C:CLISP-2.38> RENAME sqlite.dll libsqlite.so

C:CLISP-2.38> CLISP
[1]> (require  "clisp-sqlite_1.0/clisp-sqlite")
;; Loading file C:clisp-2.38clisp-sqlite_1.0clisp-sqlite.lisp ...
;;  Loaded file C:clisp-2.38clisp-sqlite_1.0clisp-sqlite.lisp

Question 2: What is necessary to make Clisp on Windows user experience so that "It-Just-Works"?

Things seem to work pretty well afterwards:

(require "clisp-sqlite_1.0/clisp-sqlite")
(sqlite:with-open-db (db "test.db")
    (sqlite:sql db
        "create table todo (todoid int, name varchar(50), done int)")
    (sqlite:sql db
        "insert into TODO (TODOID, Name, Done) VALUES (1, 'USE LISP', 0)")
    (format t "~a" (sqlite:sql db
        "SELECT TODOID, Name, Done FROM TODO")))

Question 3: Are there any standard APIs that the Lisp community uses to access databases? CLSQL seems promising.. but CLISP wasn’t mentioned in the compatibility list. What about MaiSQL ? Where’s the consensus here?

Answers appreciated.