[info-mcl] digitool (MCL) / clozure (OpenMCL)

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On Oct 10, 2007, at 5:25 PM, Ron Garret wrote:

> It seems to me that
> if there's already a Lisp-ObjC bridge then the full-access part of
> the equation is solved.  (The fact that it's hard to use is just a
> fact of life at this point.  Cocoa is what it is.)

I think part of this was touched on by Andrew Shalit when he mentioned  
the current difficulty in debugging across language runtimes. If not  
actually being able to intervene in the bowels of the objc runtime  
from within openmcl, then at least being insulated from dropping into  
the openmcl kernel debugger when one pisses off the cocoa runtime  
would be nice ;^)

On LispWorks I generally need to have Console.app running side by side  
with the LispWorks IDE to debug cocoa stuff - one thing that makes  
cocoa frameworks nice is their copious console error messages. If this  
is the best we can hope for, then so be it.


> Right now
> the fact that I can't access OpenMCL except through a terminal (and
> it doesn't even have Gnu readline) is the only show stopper for me.
> (By minimal GUI I basically mean textedit plus the ability to double-
> click on a close paren to select a sexpr, and/or hit "enter" to
> evaluate it.)

I'm in 100% agreement on this. Even the most minimal GUI would make a  
*huge* difference to me. The difficulties of debugging cocoa code  
notwithstanding, I'm perfectly happy to hammer out the rest of what I  
need on my own - or, as Rainer suggests, more likely as part of a  
collaborative community effort. We just need a bare bones cocoa  
application on which to build.

While we're on the topic, I remember that an issue with the :cocoa- 
application was that anything built that way no longer ran on even a  
minor OS rev. This is a real show-stopper for deployed applications,  
so clozure would have to solve this as a highest priority before any  
Mac OS X cocoa openmcl could be seriously considered for real-world  
deployment.

regards,

Ralph

Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffaelcavallaro at mac.com