[Openmcl-devel] Providing an Objective-C API with Clozure

[R. Matthew Emerson]

On Jan 31, 2010, at 1:35 AM, Steven Núñez wrote:

> Greetings all,
> 
> I hope you'll forgive what is perhaps a naive question: we've got two groups (GUI & Server) that are nicely divided. Server guys need to provide an Objective-C API to the GUI guys.

I'm not sure what you mean by providing an Objective-C API.

If you have two processes (a server and a client), then I would expect that it would be feasible to set something up so that the two could communicate via NSPort objects or some other suitable Objective-C object.

It is possible to use Objective-C without the Cocoa IDE: (require 'objc-support) should do it.

You could write some little Objective-C library that the GUI guys could link to that would do whatever was needed to talk to the lisp server process.  You could offer whatever interface you wanted via Objective-C and then use whatever IPC mechanism was convenient to talk to the server (sockets or whatever).

(Of course, that little library would be written in Objective-C.  You can't write a library in lisp that you can link into a C program.)

> Is it feasible to provide this API via Clozure? Would love an excuse to use Clozure and this particular project would benefit from the rapid prototyping possible in lisp.