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

R. Matthew Emerson rme at clozure.com
Mon Feb 1 10:05:30 PST 2010


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.




More information about the Openmcl-devel mailing list