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

[mikel evins]

On Aug 9, 2004, at 6:32 AM, Takehiko Abe wrote:

> 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.

I'm using HIView in Clotho. It's higher-level than previous Carbon 
approaches, but overall the process of building an application on 
Carbon still involves considerably more low-level coding and more time 
in the OpenMCL kernel debugger than doing it with Cocoa. If the Cocoa 
bridge in OpenMCL didn't suffer from its current (temporary) problem 
with breaking when binaries move from one minor OS version to another, 
then Clotho would still be built on Cocoa.

However, as I said, there are some advantages to Carbon. It's mighty 
fast, for one thing. It's easier to wrap straight C calls in CLOS, for 
another.

>
> 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.

I don't quite understand what you're saying here.

>
> 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.
>
>
>

We'll see. I think there's room for both, and whether it's good or bad 
mostly depends on whether Apple can actually afford to support both 
sets of frameworks. So far it doesn't look like much of a problem.

--me