Okra SBCL & CCL executables for Windows released

I've saved executable images of SBCL and CCL on Windows and they're available as "okra-20090910.zip" from the Okra project page. This should make it easier for people on Windows to start playing with Okra since it comes with all the necessary libraries. Just double-click okra-sbcl.exe or okra-ccl.exe and you should be looking at a Common Lisp REPL with Okra installed. If you enter:

(load "examples/flock")

or

(okra::okra-window)

You should end up with a running demo in the first case and a blank window in the second. You do need to have DirectX installed though, unless you initialise the Okra window for OpenGL. Also this is a first release so there's some warts. The physics-and-input demo doesn't work (and isn't included) since I initialised Okra with CEGUI and that clashes. If you load these executables from your IDE or Slime instead of your regular implementation you should make sure the libraries can be found!

Paying for threading support for SBCL on Windows

I asked this on #lisp but apparently is was the wrong time of the day since there were only a couple of trolls awake. So, I'm aware threading is not support for SBCL on Windows at the moment but what I don't know is whether anyone is working or has been working on it recently. The best I could find on Google was a GSoC 2008 project by Elliot Slaughter. Now, I could try digging through the SBCL mailinglist archives on SourceForge, but Jesus Christ, I hate using that site since it is so unusable. Anyway, I'm pretty certain no work has been done on it recently. My point is: I'm willing to shell out some money for someone to work on it. Now it's not much, max 250 euros, but if there's more people than just me it might sum up to an interesting amount at some point. Why not use any of the other available implementations that already support threads then like CLISP, Clozure CL and ECL? There's a couple of reasons most of which can be argued against (like performance) but I'd basically like to see SBCL become a serious contender on Windows since it is my favourite CL implementation.