[Openmcl-devel] OpenMCL future

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 02:34 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

> These are things that I have in mind; I'd certainly be interested
> in hearing other people's ideas.
>

For starters, I think OpenMCL is a remarkable, high-quality CL 
implementation (you wouldn't expect this from a young, open source 
effort that is so low key; but you understand the reasons why if you 
know where it came from).

What I think is most important is to keep OpenMCL lean and mean: a 
small footprint, high-quality, reliable and standard compliant common 
lisp implementation. At this level what is needed above plain ANSI CL 
are modern things like processes/threads, sockets, FFI, dynamic library 
support. OpenMCL should be a good OS citizen.

To make OpenMCL more accessible and usable much more is needed, but 
with a good base to start from, anything is possible. Lot's of freeware 
CL stuff already works fine, out-of-the-box on OpenMCL (ILISP, 
portableaserver, CLX, CLOCC, PostgreSQL interface,...). GUI toolkits 
(CLX, Cocoa, Carbon) are all welcome and can form the basis for all 
kinds of IDE's. However, as is clear from MCL or ACL, GUI toolkits and 
IDE's are lots of works, needs massive support and documentation.

All this extra stuff is important, but never as important as the base 
system.

In general, I think the future of Lisp is not to replace Java or Basic 
or whatever is popular to write GUI's in the broad market, but to do 
the hard work behind the scenes (server code).

Knowing the basics of Cocoa, Objective-C, Project and Interface Builder 
myself, I think the Cocoa experiments are very interesting and should 
continue ;-)

--
Sven Van Caekenberghe - mailto:sven at beta9.be
Beta Nine - software engineering - http://www.beta9.be
.Mac - svc at mac.com - http://homepage.mac.com/svc


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