[Ecls-list] ECL on Mac OS X, general new-to-ECL issues

[lisp]

Hi Thomas,

thanks for your interest on ECL. I will proceed to answer some of your
questions and comments.

First of all, the MacOSX port has been done by me using only the account
that was available at sourceforge. This was back on OSX 10.1. The servers
running 10.2 are now almost unreachable and 10.3 is nowhere to be used.
Considering that I do not have a Mac around and that all development was
done with a slow terminal account, I think the port is not in such a bad
shape :-)

Next, ECL has been in the last four years a one-man project. Lately I have
received a lot of support from Julian Stecklina and Michael Goffioul, who
have contributed code and helped developing the port (Windows MSVC++) that
they are interested in. Other people have contributed patches for Mac OSX,
NetBSD, etc.

The professional stress and six months of intensive C++ coding for writing
a replacement for Matlab that our group can use have left me with little
time for working on ECL. This time has been mostly devoted to improving
ANSI compatibility and fixing severe, long standing bugs in the compiler.

That said, the documentation has suffered and has become outdated. Many
features are missing in the handbook, for instance the foreign function
interface, with a complete port of UFFI and the C-INLINE feature.   The
best source of information is right now the ECL code itself. For instance,
in contrib/sockets/ you will find a port of the SBCL sockets interface
done using the ECL's simple ffi. For more complicated examples, please use
the UFFI manual and report deviations.

> Has any work been done on a SLIME interface, or anything similar?  Is
> there an Emacs hiding in the distro somewhere that I'm missing?  What
> do you all use as your editor<->lisp interface?

I am working now on a port to SLIME. As mentioned in previous messages,
this is requiring intensive hacking of ECL, because SLIME assumes several
features (MOP, querying of the execution environment, breakpoints, etc)
which are missing in ECL.

Two years ago I was using ILISP quite comfortably with ECL. Lately I do to
much low-level programming to make SLIME useful for me.

If you need further help I provide on-site support in Munich at a moderate
price: a muffin and a latte machiatto :-)

Regards,

Juanjo