February 05, 2004
OS X Options Now Include CMUCL

Pierre Mai has resurrected CMUCL's PPC backend and ported it to OS X. Binaries and sources are available.

Pierre goes on to say

In any case, AFAICT, PPC/OS X is now the platform with the most Common Lisp implementations, with at least OpenMCL, MCL, LispWorks, Allegro Common Lisp, CLISP, ECL, SBCL and now CMUCL supporting OS X/Darwin...

Posted by jjwiseman at February 05, 2004 07:51 AM
Comments

But they all have marginal support for using the Cocoa libraries and Interface builder to build real OS X apps. This is sad, b/c I remember when the NeXT machine came out, you could program real applications in Allegro Common Lisp and use all the AppKit libraries, etc.

Anyone know when this is going to be rectified...?

Posted by: Sam Griffith Jr. on February 9, 2004 04:13 PM

It is gradually being rectified now.

The CAPI interface in Lispworks makes perfectly good Aqua applications, if a bit Carbon-flavored.

There is a serviceable interface to the Cocoa frameworks and Objective C runtime in OpenMCL 0.13 and 0.14 (though it is somewhat challenging to get a proper application built). You can make the process a little easier by getting Bosco from my website and by talking to me about how to use it (http://evins.net).

Gary Byers and Randall Beer are about to release an improved, more CLOS-flavored version of their interfaces; Bosco and its derivatives will of course adopt the new interface.

Brian Mastenbrook started a mailing list at common-lisp.net for folks who want to build a proper OSX/Cocoa IDE for Lisp, and I subsequently created the Clotho project, also at common-lisp.net, so that folks could help work on my embryonic IDE, based on Bosco. Plans include a Lisp interface to nibfiles.

Meanwhile, Duncan Rose and I are trying to get a Cocoa version of McCLIM working.

Meanwhile, Thomas Burdick as working on a Cocoa bridge for SBCL.

So it's possible, though still somewhat difficult, to build Cocoa apps in at least one free Lisp today, and there is considerable effort underway to make it easier.

Posted by: mikel evins on February 9, 2004 06:05 PM
Post a comment
Name:


Email Address:


URL:




Unless you answer this question, your comment will be classified as spam and will not be posted.
(I'll give you a hint: the answer is “lisp”.)

Comments:


Remember info?