[Openmcl-devel] Using Cocoa with MCL

[Gary Byers]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Yannick Versley wrote:

[other interesting stuff, and]:

>   OpenMCL currently cannot handle ObjC exceptions, and this seems to be
>   hard to do on the lisp side since _setjmp() does nothing useful when
>   invoked from lisp. This is sad because as of 13.4, ObjC exceptions
>   invoke some trap that is deep inside Stuff You Don't Want To Know About
>   and does nothing useful.
>
> Cheers,
> Yannick
>

There might be some way to do what #_setjmp does (establish something
like a CATCH frame that #_longjmp can do something like THROW to).  It
probably won't ever "work" to use #_setjmp from lisp (as if #_setjmp
was just a normal function call and not magic), but it seems like it
may be possible to do something like:

(rlet ((buf :jmp_buf))
  (catch :some-tag
   (%%associate-jmp-buf-with-current-catch-frame buf)
   (progn
     (whatever)))) ; that association needs to be broken; perhaps
                     this'd work better if it was nested differently

If a jmp_buf was "associated" with a catch frame (and this all worked),
then #_longjmp to that jmp_buf would behave exactly like a THROW to
that frame's tag.  There are lots of gory details and complications,
but this might (with suitable macrology to hide those details) make
it possible to write ObjC-visible exception handlers in lisp.

The next nasty surprise awaiting us is the observation that merely
transferring control to the right place (via #_longjmp) isn't
adequate: THROW "unwinds the stack" on the way to its target,
discarding intervening CATCH frames and executing intervening
UNWIND-PROTECT cleanup forms.  If there's a reasonably sane way to
patch #_longjmp (kind of sounds like an oxymoron already) so that it
does the right thing, it seems like it'd be worth the effort to do
so.

The ObjC runtime maintains a per-thread LIFO list of exception
handlers; THROW is ordinarily blissfully unaware of this.  I'm not
sure how to effect this, but throwing "past" an ObjC exception
handler should ideally remove that handler from the per-thread
list.


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