[Openmcl-devel] ClozureCL on iPhone

[Paul Krueger]

On Nov 2, 2011, at 3:09 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

...

> Different people may evaluate those risks differently, but I think that
> being able to develop natively in full-blown CCL has a lot of advantages
> and don't personally assess the risks as being very great.  I think that
> this is likely the most expedient way to get anywhere, but other approaches
> can eventually be made to work they might be more attractive to people
> who assess those risks differently.

I couldn't agree more. I've seen some cross-compile environments that sort of worked, but generally speaking they're a pain and in this particular case where the libraries and interface idioms are substantially different it's really impossible to test anywhere but on a native platform. While I was hoping that the iOS simulator might also work, it wouldn't bother me overly much if it didn't and that was the only problem.

> 
> Apple has sometims claimed that jailbreaking could lead to a number of
> unfortunate consequences.  I may be misremembering the details; I don't
> know that they claimed that the earth "would" spin off its axis or merely
> noted that it "could" do so.  Likewise, I don't know that they claimed
> that jailbreaking would lead to a general decay in moral fiber and an
> increase in street crime or claimed that it was a byproduct of that
> moral decay; my memory of that's a bit fuzzy.

Since my last email I've done more research on jailbreaking and also exchanged emails with a friend who is a Linux kernel developer and regular iOS jailbreaker. He gave me a much better idea about what's involved. After looking through the history of move and countermove it seems plausible and perhaps likely that Apple will eventually win this battle. The necessary exploits have gotten more involved and unpleasant for developers and (at least for untethered booting) requires finding a user-level exploit to acquire root privileges. Although so far that hasn't been a problem (and it seems that one for iOS 5 is imminent) it's difficult for me to believe that will continue indefinitely. I'm not anxious to invest months or years of effort just to see it made worthless. I'm also not anxious to figure out how to jailbreak all over again every few months. This seems like a deal-killer for me right now, but I'll keep monitoring it.

> 
> I'm quite sure, however, that if I see one more message that says "why
> can't you just cross compile ..." there will be some acts of senseless
> violence.

Hopefully we can keep your blood pressure down and protect your health; you're much too valuable to lose to a blown artery. I'll take the pledge; you didn't (at least not recently), and won't, see a suggestion to cross-compile come from me. That doesn't mean that I'll give up hope that it will someday be possible to use CCL to develop iOS apps.