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

[Mike Byrne]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:02:19 -0400, Andrew Shalit <alms at clozure.com>
wrote:

> Some people love the idea of being able to use Core Animation from
> inside our CL applications. Others just want to type (MAKE-INSTANCE
> 'WINDOW) and have it do the right thing.  We'd be very interested in
> hearing where on that spectrum MCL users come down.

Ask a bunch of Lisp programmers an either/or question, and of course the
answer you get from everyone is "both."

I think, obviously, people do want both.

I suspect, however, Andrew's question was more along the lines of "we
have limited resources and can't do both simultaneously, so which should
we prioritize?"

If I'm right about that question, I want (MAKE-INSTANCE 'WINDOW) to do
the right thing more than I want Core Animation or similar extras.  What
I want, what I would have liked a year ago, is some way to make my
current quick-and-dirty GUIs written in MCL to be usable on Intel
hardware with as little pain as possible.

I have been toying with LispWorks, and I'm sure I can get it to do in
CAPI all the things I used to do in MCL.  But CAPI is kind of odd and
it's noticeably more work to do what I want in CAPI than it is in MCL.
MCL's view hierarchy model is just a lot more straightforward if you're
doing things that aren't too complicated.  And I need access to whatever
the equivalent is of the Carbon toolbox because I need to do things like
hide the menubar.

If Core Animation comes later, that's a bonus, but only a bonus;  the
ability to redeploy my legacy MCL code (some of it almost 15 years old)
on Intel hardware is my current biggest interest.

And Fred (or something very Fred-like, which the LispWorks editor is
not) with the MCL debugger.  I'd put that on the list before Core
Animation, too.

-Mike

===========================================================
Mike Byrne, Ph.D.                           <byrne at acm.org>
Associate Professor, Psychology and Computer Science
Rice University, MS-25        <http://chil.rice.edu/byrne/>
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