[Openmcl-devel] DeLurking...

[Brent Fulgham]

--- I wrote:

> > So, I'm interested in writing applications for
> > OS X in Lisp, but I'm not sure what resources are
> > out there for picking this up.  The Bosco
> > framework looks promising, but perhaps there are 
> > better choices.
> 

--- Dan Knapp <dankna at accela.net> wrote:
>    Well, to write native apps you'll need to learn
> the Cocoa API, if you aren't already familiar with
> it from other languages.

[ ... snip useful links ... ]

Thanks for the references.  I've read through them,
and had a couple of initial questions that perhaps
some of you can answer:

1.  The documents indicate that the (require 'COCOA)
takes several seconds to perform.  Launching hemlock
is certainly slow (in fact, I thought I had made
an error building it and was thinking about killing
the session when it finally popped up!)

However, Alpaca is very quick to start up.  Is this
some selective importing on Alpaca's part (avoiding
the need to bind all of those symbols)?  Or, is the
slowness just a by-product of dynamically creating
the linkage from Obj-C to Lisp (which probably isn't
done in a compiled application).

2.  A more to-the-point rephrasing of Question #1:
Will a compiled image of an application in OpenMCL 
suffer the same slowness in launching that the
listener does?

3.   I see lots of lamentations about updates of OS X
causing applications using the Obj-C bridge to fail.
Can anyone provide the 5,000 foot overview of why
this happens?  Is it like trying to link against the
wrong version of a C library?  (I.e., OS X 10.4 has
probably modified some function signatures, etc.  Is
this the cause of the problem)?  

4.  Finally, does anyone have any small Cocoa apps
written with the Obj-C bridge that I could look at for
educational purposes?

Thanks,

-Brent