Leverage Cern Root

[alejandrogallo]

I have asked myself always why people don't leverage more Root https://root.cern/.
It seems that providing high quality bindings from common lisp would be super useful,
both for statistics, plotting and even for 3d graphics https://root.cern.ch/doc/master/group__opengl.html

Has anyone tried to really consider this?

[snunez1]

That's an interesting idea, and bindings would be useful. There's cephes.cl for many statistical functions, but Root seems to cover a lot more.

I think a wrapper is possible to build now, but would be 'cutting edge'. The reason is that wrapping C++ has historically been a challenge in Common Lisp. Wrapping C is is easy. There are a couple of systems for wrapping C++ that have been released in the last year that could be used. I suspect something this large will expose some bugs, so whoever does this will have to work with the system authors (of the C++ wrapping systems) to resolve any issues.

I hope someone picks this idea up.

[alejandrogallo]

cephes.cl is great.
Maybe next year if I still want to use it I'll give it a try.
The thing that makes me a bit
optimistic and pesimistic is that root is completely interfaced with
python.

https://github.com/root-project/root/tree/master/bindings

I'm not an expert in bindings but that looks like a lot of work.
However I think even if daunting, it would supercharge the common lisp ecosystem.

[snunez1]

If I were doing this, I'd use an autowrap. Cephes was small enough to do by hand. There are some large-ish wrappers of C libraries done with auto-wrap. It should also work with C++, but it's untested as far as I know.