On: Pattern matching and tail recursion in Emacs Lisp

[Archelaos]

I would like to give Common Lisp a try. What setup/frameworks are best for a beginner targeting Win10 GUI apps (ideally self-contained in a single exe) that need to access a MariaDB server over the Internet?

[mark_l_watson → Archelaos]

I don’t use Windows, but LispWorks is well supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I bought the macOS version and pay the yearly maintenance fee. It has a good portable GUI library called CAPI and creates small standalone executables.

LispWorks is expensive so try the free version for a long time to make sure it is right for you.

For macOS and Linux, the open source SBCL is excellent and there are libraries to use TK or web apps as GUI interfaces.

[dwringer → mark_l_watson]

I'll second that Tk works well with SBCL, and add that I have also used it in a Windows 10 environment without much hassle (although a web app GUI is a great route), the libraries may not all be up to date with the latest features but it's relatively straightforward to implement them looking at the source code as a template. With CFFI one can get into the windows API pretty readily as well, so the sky's really the limit.

As far as being self-contained it's at least easy enough to get everything within a single project directory, and one should be able to load pretty much everything (other than if you rely on tcl or something external like that) into the image and save it as an .exe with sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die.

[tmtvl → Archelaos]

Probably LTK and CLSQL. Accessing a MySQL (well, MariaDB is a drop-in replacement) DB over the internet is no different from accessing it locally.

If you don't like Tk, there's a few alternatives like IUP or Qtools.

Of course if you'd prefer you could grab Armed Bear, use Java libraries, and export a JAR. In that case you can use Swing and JDBC.