[Openmcl-devel] default directory

[R. Matthew Emerson]

On May 3, 2009, at 4:39 PM, Joakim Sandgren wrote:

> it seems to me that easygui is a package that is made a little ad  
> hoc, "for now", to resolve urgent needs now. and the gui package is  
> part of the "real" cocoa communication in clozure ccl...
> and perhaps in a future better version the easygui will be obsolete  
> but the gui package not...
>
> I am of course still waiting for some window functions in ccl, and  
> for the moment being I dont know on wich horse I should bet...

At the moment, I find that I am more-or-less writing Objective-C code  
in Lisp.  That is to say, I'm just using the Objective-C bridge  
directly.  On the one hand, this is not so bad:  it's certainly handy  
to be able to add and redefine Objective-C methods on-the-fly, and so  
forth.  In some ways, it even feels pretty high-level.  After a while  
you become desensitized to the  #/callSomeMethod syntax and forget  
that you're calling foreign code (at least until you screw up and  
crash the lisp).

On the other hand, you really need to know Cocoa pretty well in order  
to work like this.  You have to understand various Cocoa conventions  
like naming, memory management, the model-view-controller pattern  
(ugh, I said "pattern"), threading issues, etc.

I think we do need some sort of CLOS-y interface to Cocoa that  
abstracts out the need to worry about running stuff on the proper  
thread, takes care of appropriately retaining and releasing Objective- 
C objects, does something about the lisp string to NSString hassle,  
and so on.

Easy GUI is an experiment in that direction.  I am not using Easy GUI  
when developing code for the IDE, but I do hope that as we all get  
more experience programming Cocoa in CCL, we'll be able to identify  
and implement good abstractions for various aspects of Cocoa and put  
that code somewhere, whether that be Easy GUI or somewhere else.