[Openmcl-devel] What is the state of the phemlock included with OpenMCL?

[Takehiko Abe]

mikel evins wrote:

> And in some ways, the very lower-level nature of Carbon, though it 
> means more gruntwork to get things working well, makes it easier to 
> integrate into a Lisp application, simply because the API consists of 
> smaller, simpler pieces that are easier to assemble into Lispy 
> aggregates. 

Have you tried HIView? It is not that low-level. It's a view-based
framework (just like MCL's view system). Apple engineers are pushing
it hard and they are succeeding.

There is a ongoing thread titled "Carbon future" at the carbon-dev
mailing list @ lists.apple.com and a former engineer of Apple who
worked on HIView posted the following in reply to the question
"why did Apple choose not to make Cocoa a framework on top of
Carbon?":

; - The Cocoa team isn't going to want to switch their view
;   system over to be hosted on HIView. It might seem to them
;   that they are giving up some ground, in a way.
;
; - There are certain technical problems in doing this. How
;   do you deal with subclassing, etc. for example? Do you use
;   NS stuff as the basis, or do you use HIObject? Both are
;   capable, though certainly the NS stuff has the advantage
;   of an in-language solution. [...]

In the first point, you can replace "Cocoa team" with
"MCL users" or "Digitool". (and replace "giving up some
ground with "HUGE ground".)

The second point also applies to CLOS.

My impression is that the Carbon team @ Apple have determined
to go for a higher level framework (which is HIView) and want
to compete with Cocoa rather than staying to be a low level API.
This is very disturbing.