[Openmcl-devel] impressions of openmcl, the cocoa bridge, and easygui

[Alexander Repenning]

just a quick comment. If performance is a concern (and perhaps the  
option of being able to run platform independent is welcome feature)  
the you may want to explore the OpenGL route. I am not sure what you  
mean with "high-quality, high-performance interactive graphics" but if  
you mean some kind of plotter (2D, 3D) function with potentially large  
numbers of lines/polygons/surfaces then the OpenGL opens up paths that  
are magnitudes faster than going through the Cocoa-level line graphics  
API. We already have some Clozure CL OpenGL interfaces. You can still  
work with Cocoa events etc. it is just that the drawing surface is  
OpenGL managed.

Alex


On Jun 27, 2008, at 11:48 PM, Rich Sutton wrote:

> hello all,
>
> i have recently been exploring openmcl and would like to briefly  
> pass on my impressions and some suggestions for what they are  
> worth.  first, about myself.  i am an artificial intelligence  
> researcher and previous long-time user of mcl, and i have turned to  
> openmcl (rather than, say, sbcl) primarily because of the hope of  
> regaining the ease of access to gui features that i remember from  
> mcl.  thus it is these features that i concentrated on in examining  
> openmcl.  to try things out i ported some existing graphics code  
> from mcl to openmcl, converting the quicktime calls to the  
> appropriate calls to the cocoa bridge, and working from the example  
> of easygui.  specifically, i revived some code for quickly throwing  
> up simple line graphs.  here is a simple example with the screen  
> shot showing that it works in openmcl:
>
> 		<quickgraph screenshot.pdf>
>
> resizing and minimizing work, and there are a lot of other quick  
> graphing things you can do (see http://rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/graphlispmanual.html) 
> .  the code is not ready to be a contrib or anything - it is just a  
> quick port to learn a little about openmcl and the bridge, but it  
> may be a useful example in some respects so i will include some  
> pointers to the code at the end of this note.
>
> now to my impressions.  overall, they are positive.  after my week  
> of hacking, learning about cocoa, the bridge, openmcl, everything,  
> it seems to me that openmcl can indeed be what i am looking for -- a  
> quality general-purpose common-lisp with high-quality, high- 
> performance interactive graphics.  it is also pretty clear to me  
> some of what more is needed (in the gui/graphics area), and though  
> it will take some work, it's not a terribly big amount of work, and  
> it can be done incrementally.  the cocoa-bridge strategy is a good  
> one i think.  cocoa/quartz is a modern and very well thought-out gui  
> package, and we should be leveraging off of that design rather than  
> trying to make it all up ourselves.  but the way things stand right  
> now there are huge hurdles to getting started.
>
> i spent at least a week of learning cocoa, the bridge, easygui,  
> everything, with many crashes and beachballs before i got any  
> graphics gratification.  one simple thing i learned and i wish  
> someone had told me was to not use the ide directly, but to go  
> through emacs/slime.  that way at least you don't lose your edits  
> when the beach ball happens.  my experience is that the ide is  
> promising but not quite ready for prime time.  i ran into crashes  
> and bugs partly for ide things, and partly because i was doing  
> inherently dangerous things like foreign function calls and working  
> with foreign data structures.  the latter are the main real  
> problem;  we need to provide an additional layer to insulate the  
> lisp user from the foreign stuff (if she so desires), as in easygui.
>
> i would like to further development of the easygui design, as time  
> allows.  i note that arthur has just made some new contributions in  
> this direction.
>
> rich sutton
>
> ----
> to run the quick-graphing code:
>
> start up the ide, or do (require "COCOA") and (require "easygui")
> load the attached files, in order:
>     (load "mclgui")
>     (load "cclg")
>     (load "graph-without-events")
>
> then, e.g.,
> (graph (list (loop for x below 8 by 0.1 collect (sin x))
>                   (loop for x below 8 by 0.1 collect (cos x))))
>
> <mclgui.lisp>   (this is the only file with code potentially worth  
> looking at right now)
>
> <cclg.lisp>
>
>
> <graph-without-events.lisp>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf


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