Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log

Paolo Amoroso's weblog. Main interests: Lisp, astronomy (Moon), space exploration (Apollo and early manned programs)

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Closure web browser no longer builds: bitrot

Monday, January 24, 2005

Closure is a powerful web browser written in Common Lisp by Gilbert Baumann (described in this paper by Gilbert; screen shots here). The current GUI is based on McCLIM, but still includes some bits from an earlier one based on CLUE.

It has accumulated enough bitrot that it apparently can no longer be built from source. Gilbert is very busy and probably has no time to fix this.

The latest news item at the project site is dated 2003-03-14. Access to the CVS repository, which runs on the author's home machine, is no longer available, and the latest code snapshot at the site is also dated 2003-03-14.

I was able to get a more recent snapshot from Christophe Rhodes, 2004-10-20, and some patches. But I can not currently build Closure with a recent CMUCL, neither with the latest McCLIM CVS sources, nor with the version of McCLIM that comes with Closure. If you can, I'd like to hear from you.

The current unavailability of Closure is sad news. As far as I know, it is the only browser written in Lisp. To get an idea of its usefulness and potential, have a look at this screen shot of the Climacs text editor.