McCLIM is an amazing project and a treasure trove of useful utils like CLOUSEAU. Unfortunatelly currently McCLIM has no backend for Windows. I'd like to use McCLIM and experiment with developing a backend.

Windows is quite hostile environment for mostly Unix-based Lisp packages. And McCLIM is not an exception. It uses CLX as a backend library and depends on STATIC-VECTORS - package that require CFFI-GROVELER to dynamically compile C program on system load.

Lisp (SBCL) setup for Windows

Roswell

I'm using Roswell to manage Lisp implementations and local projects.

Setup MSYS

This part of loosely based on Portacle build instructions:

• Install MSYS2. Please use default installation path. It will save you lots of time.

• 7Zip, download, install, add it to Windows PATH http://www.7-zip.org

• Open the MSYS shell and run pacman -Sy pacman

• Reopen the shell and run pacman -Syu

• Install packages:

pacman -S unzip git gpg curl base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox mingw-w64-x86_64-pcre mingw-w64-x86_64-curl mingw-w64-x86_64-gnutls mingw-w64-x86_64-iconv mingw-w64-x86_64-libgcrypt mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw

• Launch the MinGW64 shell and use it for further steps

Install roswell

• Follow https://github.com/roswell/roswell/wiki/Installation#building-from-source.
• In my case I've used ./configure --prefix=/c/opt/roswell & make & make install.
• Add roswell/bin and $HOME/.roswell/bin folders to your Windows and Mingw64 PATH environment variables.
• Run ros for initial setup

Build latest SBCL

• Install latest SBCL ros install sbcl/2.0.3
• Switch to that version ros use sbcl/2.0.3

Configure Sly

I'm using Sly but Slime setup roughly the same. Please note the hacky way of running ros in Mingw64 shell.

• Start a bare shell without fancy terminal emulator window as that's what Emacs expects -defterm -no-start.

• ros -L sbcl selects our freshly built SBCL version. Please refer to roswell documentation on managing Lisp implementations.

• DISPLAY=localhost:0 is the usual X Server display environment variable. This is needed for McCLIM to run and obviously requires that X Server program is up an running on display :0.

(set-language-environment "UTF-8")
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
    
(use-package sly
             :ensure t
             :init
             (remove-hook 'lisp-mode-hook 'slime-lisp-mode-hook)
             :config
             (setq sly-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
             (setq sly-lisp-implementations
                   `((sbcl ("c:/msys64/msys2_shell.cmd"  "-defterm" "-mingw64" "-no-start" "-c" "DISPLAY=localhost:0 ros -L sbcl -Q run") :coding-system utf-8-unix))))

Running McCLIM

• Precache fonts
  • In Mingw64 terminal run fc-cache /c/Windows/Fonts
  • Add this command to ~/.bashrc
• Ensure X Server is running
• Run McCLIM as usual