[Openmcl-devel] impressions of openmcl, the cocoa bridge, and easygui

[Rich Sutton]

hello all,

i have recently been exploring openmcl and would like to briefly pass  
on my impressions and some suggestions for what they are worth.   
first, about myself.  i am an artificial intelligence researcher and  
previous long-time user of mcl, and i have turned to openmcl (rather  
than, say, sbcl) primarily because of the hope of regaining the ease  
of access to gui features that i remember from mcl.  thus it is these  
features that i concentrated on in examining openmcl.  to try things  
out i ported some existing graphics code from mcl to openmcl,  
converting the quicktime calls to the appropriate calls to the cocoa  
bridge, and working from the example of easygui.  specifically, i  
revived some code for quickly throwing up simple line graphs.  here is  
a simple example with the screen shot showing that it works in openmcl:

		
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resizing and minimizing work, and there are a lot of other quick  
graphing things you can do (see http://rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/graphlispmanual.html) 
.  the code is not ready to be a contrib or anything - it is just a  
quick port to learn a little about openmcl and the bridge, but it may  
be a useful example in some respects so i will include some pointers  
to the code at the end of this note.

now to my impressions.  overall, they are positive.  after my week of  
hacking, learning about cocoa, the bridge, openmcl, everything, it  
seems to me that openmcl can indeed be what i am looking for -- a  
quality general-purpose common-lisp with high-quality, high- 
performance interactive graphics.  it is also pretty clear to me some  
of what more is needed (in the gui/graphics area), and though it will  
take some work, it's not a terribly big amount of work, and it can be  
done incrementally.  the cocoa-bridge strategy is a good one i think.   
cocoa/quartz is a modern and very well thought-out gui package, and we  
should be leveraging off of that design rather than trying to make it  
all up ourselves.  but the way things stand right now there are huge  
hurdles to getting started.

i spent at least a week of learning cocoa, the bridge, easygui,  
everything, with many crashes and beachballs before i got any graphics  
gratification.  one simple thing i learned and i wish someone had told  
me was to not use the ide directly, but to go through emacs/slime.   
that way at least you don't lose your edits when the beach ball  
happens.  my experience is that the ide is promising but not quite  
ready for prime time.  i ran into crashes and bugs partly for ide  
things, and partly because i was doing inherently dangerous things  
like foreign function calls and working with foreign data structures.   
the latter are the main real problem;  we need to provide an  
additional layer to insulate the lisp user from the foreign stuff (if  
she so desires), as in easygui.

i would like to further development of the easygui design, as time  
allows.  i note that arthur has just made some new contributions in  
this direction.

rich sutton

----
to run the quick-graphing code:

start up the ide, or do (require "COCOA") and (require "easygui")
load the attached files, in order:
      (load "mclgui")
      (load "cclg")
      (load "graph-without-events")

then, e.g.,
(graph (list (loop for x below 8 by 0.1 collect (sin x))
                    (loop for x below 8 by 0.1 collect (cos x))))

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    (this is the only file with code potentially worth looking at  
right now)

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