While looking for a suitable lisp to use on a Win32 platform, I wanted to look for one that was natively buildable on it.

Chicken sounded interesting, and moreover they had (at some point of time) made it buildable using cmake (which made me particularly happy, because of the possibility of generating SLN files for Visual Studio 2005). However, for some unknown reason, they gave up on cmake… I wish they would take it up again

ECL was the next best thing - which later turned out to be the best thing. All I needed to do now was to build it.

I use Powershell - previously known as Monad (no.. seriously..) - for that unixy shell which is generations ahead of the lowly windows “cmd”. It allows me to specify variables in a startup script and is therefore portable across machines (unlike traditional environment variables in windows which need to be set by right-clicking “My Computer”)

All you need to do (theoretically) to build ecl is switch to the msvc directory and type “nmake” - this of course doesnt work unless you have some variables set.

First out, you get loads of 0xc0000139 errors in the build stage - clearly it points to certain DLL entry points not being found. What you need to do is set the path variable correctly:

$env:path=$env:path +:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE”

(I think it was due to mspdb80.dll or something). In addition I had to download utildll.dll and mobsync.dll from NoDevice (and put in one of the “path” directories).

Second out, I needed ntwin32.mak - which as I discovered, defines platform specific variables for Makefiles.

$env:include=$env:include + “;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Include”

Third, I needed user32.lib:

$env:lib = $env:lib + “;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\PlatformSDK\Lib”

Now that I have a working (and buildable ) implementation of Common Lisp - where to start? SICP or PAIP?