Boxer Sunrise

This is the current iteration of the historic Boxer project.

Release Downloads

Packaged binary releases can be found on the Github Releases page:

https://github.com/boxer-project/boxer-sunrise/releases

Supported Platforms

Currently Boxer is tested on the following platforms:

• Apple Intel: macOS 10.14 Mojave through macOS 12 Monterey
• Apple M1: macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey
• x86 Windows 10 ( 2022-03-16 Still needs further testing on LW 8.0 )

These all use Lispworks 8.0.

Boxer can be run and developed against using the freely available version of Lispworks. However, in order to build deliverable binaries a professional license is required. It's a known issue that the linux version of Lispworks runs out of heap when loading Boxer.

Work is in progress to run Boxer against fully open source versions of common lisp, focused primarily on SBCL. Additionally the ability to run the core boxer evaluator separately to integrate with new web ecosystems (such as node and a possible server side Boxer).

Setting up your Development environment

macOS

• Install Lispworks 8.0, including any patches available from Lispworks.

• Install Quicklisp

  Be sure to include Quicklisp as part of your init file. In the Quicklisp install instructions this happens during (ql:add-to-init-file). Do note that the free version of Lispworks does not support init files, and you will need to manually load quicklisp/setup.lisp from the location of your QL installation.

  ; example on windows
  (load "Z:/quicklisp/setup.lisp")

• Install our patched cl-freetype2, cl-opengl, and zip projects. These are small workarounds, and ideally will be removed at some point in the future.

  # substitute for your quicklisp install location
  cd ~/quicklisp/local-projects
  git clone --branch=lispworks-fixup https://github.com/sgithens/cl-freetype2.git
  git clone --branch=lispworks-fixup https://github.com/sgithens/cl-opengl.git
  git clone --branch=lispworks-fixup https://github.com/sgithens/zip.git

• Install freetype2 libraries, headers, etc

  brew install freetype2

• git clone git@github.com:boxer-project/boxer-sunrise.git

Windows 10

These are the same as the above with the exception of the freetype2 libraries. Here is one way to install them using MSYS2. You may choose to use a different build system for Windows.

• Install MSYS2 64-bit from https://www.msys2.org/

• From msys2 install freetype2

  pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain
  pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-freetype

• Add C:\msys64\mingw64\bin to the windows PATH environment variable.

You also need the patched cl-freetype2 bindings, as above (clone it under %HOMEPATH%/quicklisp/local-projects/).

Running Boxer

With the above dependencies installed and a lispworks Listener open, the following will compile and startup Boxer (adjusting the path accordingly to your system.)

;; This needs to be a full path to the bootstrap file
(load #P"~/code/boxer-sunrise/src/bootstrap.lisp")

Building the Boxer executable on MacOS

in-progress These instructions are being updated still for several binary libraries that need to be included in the build

MacOS application bundles can be created with the following delivery script. This will assume you have lispworks installed and have the executable in the path. This has been tested with Lispworks 8.0. While you can run Boxer from the personal edition of Lispworks, you will need on of the paid Profession versions that include the framework for creating application binaries. (In Lispworks this is called the delivery framework).

git clone git@github.com:sgithens/boxer-sunrise.git
cd boxer-sunrise
lispworks -build src/delivery-script.lisp

You will now find a double-clickable MacOS application in boxer-sunrise/data/boxersunrise.app.

Boxer Core

Parts of Boxer that should run on most common lisp implementation are being slowly factored in to the boxer-sunrise-core asdf system.

Examples of running the unit tests on ECL, SBCL, and Lispworks are below:

# I like to wrap these in rlwrap in case I need to use the REPL, but it's optional

#ECL
rlwrap ecl --load ./run-core-tests.lisp

#SBCL
rlwrap sbcl --load ./run-core-tests.lisp

#Lispworks
# From the editor run:
(load #P"~/path/to/boxer-sunrise/run-core-tests.lisp")

Authors through the years

• Andrea A. diSessa
• Hal Abelson
• David Neves
• Eric Tenenbaum
• Gregor Kiczales
• Edward H. Lay
• Leigh Klotz
• Jeremy Roschelle
• Maurice Anchor
• Steven W. Githens

Source Acknowledgements

The start and stop icons are adapted from the Scratch project and subject to the BSD/Creative Commons License per the rest of Scratch.