Friday, February 25, 2005

Foil - A Foreign Object Interface for Lisp. Common Lisp in this case. This is a protocol and set of libraries to facilitate access to other runtimes like the JVM and CLR. It is similar in idea to jfli but rather than internally accessing the runtime via FFI calls (which may not be expressive enough in the host Lisp environment) it instead connects to an out-ouf-process runtime. 2:19:49 PM

Massive Software has a shiny new website. Lots of information there, including the use of Massive in the movie Elektra. Massive was the software originally used in the Lord of the Rings movies to do the scenes with large numbers of 'artificial agents', like the battle scenes for example. I used to work on the software so I might be a bit biased, but I think it's a great piece of software and lots of fun to use. The team at Massive Software were also a pleasure to deal with. Great people, great software. 11:01:52 AM

From Gordon Weakliem comes a pointer to Sriram Krishnam answering the question of what language was used to write the original version of the  garbage collector for Microsoft's CLR: The CLR's Garbage Collection was initially written in Lisp by a Patrick Dussud (I can't find a blog). This code was then run through a Lisp->C converter which was then cleaned up by an intern. 9:48:11 AM