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> How easy is this to get setup? Just a few binaries?

From sources, just unpack, ./configure (with --prefix=/your/dest/dir if you don't want it in /usr/local/bin), make, make tests, make install if you're going from source. The dependencies are very low. But one of them is libffi; ./configure doesn't complain about it missing, but you get a build with reduced functionality (which doesn't pass certain tests).

For every release I make tarball packages for for older Debian 5.x (64 bit), Ubuntu 12 (32 bit), Mac OS 10.7.4 (64) and Solaris 10 (x86, 32 bit) as well as Cygwin (32 and 64).

For native Windows, I make a installer. It registers TXR into your PATH environment variable and associates .txr and .tl file associations.

TXR installations are relocatable: TXR discovers its own path and then finds the satellite files relative to its own location; if you keep the relative locations of the pieces as they are, you can move it anywhere in your filesystem. That's also useful for deployment. In the TXR executable there is a 128 byte space where you can embed command-line arguments to the executable. There is a helper function for this called save-exe. https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-02850687

If you've read books on Common Lisp, you're in pretty good stead. My own Lisp background is heavily Common Lisp, and the CL influences in TXR Lisp are clear; yet it's not CL and will probably mess with your head if you know a bit of CL in ways that it wouldn't if you didn't know CL. The reference manual has some dialect notes in relation to CL, far and few between though.

I don't have a newbie tutorial, unfortunately; I'm hoping someone else will write that. Keeping the documentation complete and at a good level of quality has been a big effort; it's pushing close to 700 pages now if PDF-ed.




Thanks for the lengthy reply. I'll have to give it a try at some point.

Even as a current non user I'm always super stoked by the large effort put into these projects and wish you the best!




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