[Openmcl-devel] TODO List

[Gary Byers]

Thanks for volunteering.   Both of those ideas sound worthwhile, but
they're also a bit large and potentially open-ended.

One idea for a project that's maybe a little more bounded but is definitely
significant enough to be interesting would be a review and upgrade of
OpenMCL's sockets API.  (There was a story some months ago about a
lisp project having to abandon lisp because - paraphrasing from memory -
they "couldn't do low-level socket I/O in OpenMCL".  I wasn't paying
much attention and haven't followed up on that, but my initial reaction
was - since I think of OpenMCL sockets as being a few system-call wrappers
and an inherited buffering mechanism - was surprise: I couldn't think of
any reason why the existing code would get in the way of doing arbitrary
lower-level things with the socket's file-descriptor, but of course that
reaction probably misses the point.  People presumably want a documented/
supported way of doing those things (whatever they are ...), and may
find it more expedient to switch platforms than to try to figure out
how to do them themselves.

It may be difficult to guess what the missing functionality was in 
that case, but people have dome some analysis of existing CL sockets
APIs (see <http://www.findinglisp.com/papers/sockets-analysis-0-2-5.pdf)
and there may be some initial discussion about trying to standardize
on (at least) a set of desirable features.  Tracking that effort and
trying to make some of the improvements that the paper suggest is
clearly something that should go on the ToDo list; is that something
that you'd be interested in ?

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, M.J. Stahl wrote:

> I have read the discussions on this mailing list concerning unicode support,
> and I was thinking:
>
> Would looking over CLISP's unicode files help in any manner? Or maybe even
> SBCL?
>
> Of course using code directly from CLISP would cause problems due to the GPL
> restrictions, but this usage would be fine in reference to SBCL.
>
> This thought of course is somewhat without merit due to my lack of knowledge
> concerning the internals of OpenMCL, and I am sure these thoughts have
> already been considered by those that understand the system to a greater
> degree.
>
> Another question I had, after talking to Rainer Joswig, was whether someone
> had the MCL documentation concerning MCL's Carbon integration.  Rainer had
> mentioned that he found the API rather nice, and to have such integration in
> OpenMCL would be a really nice feature.  I was wonder if this was something
> that could be worked on as well. I know (from reading the Wiki... I think)
> that a speed bump concerning this integration is CLOS.
>
> Mark Stahl
>
> On 3/21/06, Gary Byers <gb at clozure.com> wrote:
>>
>> There is a (very skeletal) ToDo list on the Wiki; I  actually started
>> to add a Unicode entry earlier this morning.  (It needs more work,
>> but I at least remembered to save what I was working on.)
>>
>> There could certainly stand to be more entries and, in most cases,
>> more prose/discussion attached to the existing entries.
>>
>> [Every once in a while, for reasons that I don't understand, the
>> Wiki page just stops working; restarting Apache on the server
>> seems to fix things.  I don't visit the Wiki as often as I should,
>> and therefore don't notice if it's wedged (or remember to set up
>> a cron job to restart Apache periodically, or try to figure out
>> what the real problem is ...).  When it isn't dying mysteriously,
>> it seems to work fairly well.  Thanks to people who have added
>> content there.]
>>
>> Anyway, it might take some effort to get the existing ToDo list
>> up-to-date, accurate, and useful, but there's at least a starting
>> point.
>>
>> On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, M.J. Stahl wrote:
>>
>>> Hello everyone,
>>>
>>> I am new to this mailing list and only a smalltime user of OpenMCL,
>>> but I wanted to get more involved with the development of the system
>>> because I have found it most enjoyable, and want to see it progress
>>> further.
>>>
>>> One of the things that I noticed (although it could have been missed)
>>> is an up-to-date ToDo list for OpenMCL. So is there some list, or can
>>> someone list some of the current developments so I can see what I
>>> could actually help out with compared to what is needed.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> Mark Stahl
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Openmcl-devel mailing list
>>> Openmcl-devel at clozure.com
>>> http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel
>>>
>>>
>>
>