[Openmcl-devel] iPad?

[Andrew Shalit]

On Jan 28, 2010, at 11:21 AM, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> On 28 Jan 2010, at 15:55, Paul Krueger wrote:
> 
>> The new iPad uses Apple's proprietary A4 chip which reportedly has a
>> Power architecture. Anyone want to speculate on the availability of
>> CCL for it? Might be interesting ...
>> 
> 
> If it is licensed the same way as the iPhone you presumably will not  
> be able to put applications onto it which allow it to be programmed.
> 
> I kind of hope that's not the case though, because something (in fact  
> the only thing) I'd want such a machine for would be providing a  
> seriously portable symbolic maths environment.


That's almost certainly the case.

It is, though, possible to write applications in Lisp that do not themselves provide programming tools to the end user.  I believe Apple would let us do that.  This would involve cross-compilation, the same way that Objective C code is compiled and debugged from the Mac but runs on the iPad/IPhone/iPod Touch.

The A4 is some kind of ARM, so this would at minimum require an ARM port.  Of course, we don't know what changes Apple has made to the A4 relative to other ARMs, and Apple probably wouldn't tell us, so that would be tricky.  But if anyone wants to fund an ARM port, we'd be more than happy to look into it.