[Openmcl-devel] Mac App store: solving Lisp's last mile problem

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> writes:

> 4.  If you've decided that you really want to develop apps in Common
> Lisp, do you really want to do it in Clozure Common Lisp?  Maybe it
> would be easier to sneak, say, CLisp or ECL past the censors at Apple.

CCL seems to be better at GUI programming on MacOSX than clisp or ECL.
It would be nice if it was 'homologated' for AppStore deployments.

> If you get a big enough group of people to answer yes to *all* of
> those questions then it might be worthwhile discussing how to use CCL
> to develop apps.  But otherwise I submit we should focus our
> attentions elsewhere.  The app store is not all there is.

If the undocumented API uses could be lifted, I think we would have an
implementation that would be even more easily ported to other platforms,
so there would be additionnal advantages to do it.


> (BTW, if I were going to develop apps I'd personally look very hard at
> option 3.  Back in the day I built a little Lisp on top of C++ and it
> turned out to be surprisingly easy to do and it worked surprisingly
> well.  Nowadays doing the same thing for ObjC should be even easier
> since ObjC's semantics are already pretty Lispy.)

Personnaly, I don't think it's worthwhile to limit oneself with little
lisps, given the capabilities of nowadays hardware.


> Or we could use CCL to develop the platform that becomes the de facto
> standard for cloud computing.  We can develop on Macs and deploy on
> Linux.  We don't have to worry about what Steve Jobs thinks.  We don't
> have to learn any new frameworks or build any new infrastructure.  CCL
> is ready for this task TODAY (and has been ready for quite a while
> now).  And we can actually get significant leverage from the features
> that are still unique to CL.

Definitely.  I intend to develop iPad applications that will be more a
user interface to a backend application than the whole thing.  And the
backend will of course run on Linux and be written in Lisp in any case.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/