CEPL

This weekend I have been exploring CEPL: "a lispy and REPL-friendly Common Lisp library for working with OpenGL", as its author writes. I have no prior experience with OpenGL, but thanks to Baggers' video series "Pushing pixels with Lisp", and predating the examples I found, I managed to write some working code. I have a project idea in mind, let's see how it ends up.

A couple of remarks if you're inclined to experiment on your own.

• When I started I was not able to run cepl:repl, due to the OpenGL version exposed by my driver (3.0, whereas the mininum for CEPL is 3.1). But that's not the actual version supported by the hardware. To access the real capabilities, and ultimately to be able to run CEPL, you must ask explicitly, for example (cepl:repl 800 600 3.1); I initially missed that, so I spent time trying to solve the wrong problem.

• I work with xmonad. The default tiled windows positioning is not ideal with the CEPL output window, but thankfully CEPL's window is easy to identify at manageHook level by its title. So I added this in my configuration: <+> (title =? "CEPL" --> doFloat). For example:

  myManageHook = manageDocks
    <+> (title =? "CEPL" --> doFloat)
    <+> manageHook defaultConfig