Lemonodor: Lispworks Beta for OS X

March 27, 2003

Lispworks Beta for OS X

Xanalys is soliciting beta testers for Lispworks on OS X.

LispWorks for Macintosh will support:

native Mac OS X GUI with Aqua look and feel through Cocoa, and

the X11/Motif-based GUI familiar to users of LispWorks for Unix and LispWorks for Linux

Contact them before March 31, 2003.

There have been rumors (well, ok, more than rumors) about this. It's very cool, though it does make me worry a little about Digitool. I'm probably too sentimental.

Posted by jjwiseman at March 27, 2003 12:30 PM

Comments

LispWorks on the Mac will be cool. I'm pretty sure about that. I have been using LispWorks on Unix and PC for a long time. It is quite nice.

Here is a short comparison of MCL, OpenMCL and LispWorks (PC).

MCL 5: Carbon-based. Mostly a port of MCL 4.x.
Plus: comes with most of it in source (!!!). Support for CLIM is available. Easy to use. Relatively small footprint.
Minus: lacks much of (A)MOP, compiler lacks some optimization capabilities, sometimes a bit unstable when using foreign code/data.

OpenMCL: free compiler and runtime. Comes with full source. A version with support for multiple threads/cpus is in the works. Small footprint. Early version of a cocoa interface.
Plus: free, small, full source, nice, ...
Minus: no full-blown IDE other than Emacs yet. No real GUI toolkit yet. Still in development mode.

LispWorks (Win): Native IDE. Cross platform.
Plus: *****tons***** of cool LispWorks features. LispWorks IDE (Cocoa-based on the Mac). cross platform.
Minus: almost no source code provided. Kind of largish.

Posted by: Rainer Joswig on March 28, 2003 03:01 AM

Does Lispworks on MacOS X support native threads? If I recall correctly, Lispworks on Linux/Unix didn't but the Windows version did.

Native threads support is one of the coolest things that is happening with OpenMCL.

Posted by: Ram Krishnan on March 28, 2003 07:41 AM

By the way, guys, what is the status of OpenMCL's portability? I've read something about OpenMCL in contex of i386 and/or sparc architectures, hence the question.

Posted by: yen on March 28, 2003 09:57 AM

AFAIK, current versions of OpenMCL are for PowerPC operating systems: some Linux and MacOS X.

There was an older port to SPARC - but I don't think it is being updated...

Posted by: Rainer Joswig on March 29, 2003 08:17 AM

There was once a port of what's now OpenMCL to Sparc/Solaris. Sometime between the time that I left JPL and the time that OpenMCL got opensourced the Sparc-specific kernel sources (including about 100KB of Sparc assembly-language code) got misplaced by all interested parties.

The Sparc compiler backend and bits and pieces of other Sparc-specific code are still in the source distribution (in the hope that the missing kernel sources would someday reappear.) It doesn't seem likely that they will, but it wouldn't be impossible to reimplement the missing code.

Posted by: Gary Byers on April 4, 2003 01:40 PM