[Openmcl-devel] ClozureCL on iPhone

[Gary Byers]

On Tue, 1 Nov 2011, Andrew Shalit wrote:

>
> On Nov 1, 2011, at 4:17 AM, Gary Byers wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 31 Oct 2011, Andrew Shalit wrote:
>>
>>> 4. We could write a CCL development environment that runs on
>>> jailbroken iOS devices and supports delivery on non-jailbroken
>>> devices.  This is legal, but it's not reliable and Apple would
>>> likely frown on it.
>>
>>
>> I haven't actually jailbroken an iDevice in a year or so.  I never experienced
>> any reliability problems that were related to jailbreaking and haven't heard
>> of any (to the extent that I've tried to follow things) in the last year.
>
> By "unreliable" I meant that you're dependent on the jailbreak community finding a new exploit every time a new version of iOS is released.  That's a dependency some people/organizations won't be comfortable with.

There's certainly no guarantee that you'll be able to jailbreak a
given iOS release as soon as it's released (or that the people in the
jailbreaking community won't get bored and move on to other things.)
iOS is generally portrayed as being enough of a target-rich
environment that "running out of exploits" doesn't seem like a likely
scenario, but if you were developing in Xcode (or using some
Xcode-based cross-compilation strategy) you wouldn't have to deal with
any of that.  (OTOH, you'd be developing in Xcode or using some
Xcode-based cross-compilation strategy.)




>
>> Some people may care whether or not Apple would frown at them if they
>> jailbroke their devices.  I personally like to frown at such people, but
>> have to confess that all of this frowning doesn't seem to affect much of
>> anything.
>
> By "frown" I meant "refuse to publish in the App Store any application created with it."  We just don't know.
>

Apple can pretty much refuse to publish whatever they want to refuse to publish.

I don't believe that "developing in Common Lisp on a jailbroken device" violates
any published guideline for acceptance, but if it were possible to do that those
guidelines might be revised (there's no such thing as bad publicity ...) or apps
developed that way might be arbitrarily rejected.  You're absolutely right that
no one knows.

If someone developed a really compelling iOS application with CCL (if
that were possible), Apple might say "Sure, we'd probably make a lot of money
if we accepted it, but there are principles involved, and we just can't allow
them to be violated."  If I put a nickel in front of Apple, I'd bet on them
squeezing it 'til we're all standing in the results of that, but there's 
certainly some risk that they wouldn't.