[mac-lisp-ide] status of IDE projects

[mikel evins]

Progress on the IDE projects:

First, Gary Byers has released a new version of OpenMCL, version 
0.14.1. This release has many bugfixes, better behavior with 
ANSI-compliance tests, and a major step forward in the Objective C 
bridge. On the other hand, it also means that Cocoa-related code, 
including Bosco and its derivatives, including both Clotho and the 
Cocoa backend for McCLIM, need overhauls to work with the new release. 
I intend to perform this overhaul as soon as possible; the current 
version of Bosco and its derivatives depend on the features in a range 
of CVS snapshots of 0.14, and that's undesirable. I think it's 
important to get them moved onto the released version as soon as 
possible.

The new features of the Objective C bridge have many positive qualities 
(most important being that Objective C classes are now also CLOS 
classes), but the new code also introduces a problem for delivery of 
binaries: saved images are OSX-version-specific. In other words, if you 
build an application on Jaguar then it probably won't run on Panther, 
and vice versa. I believe this is a temporary situation, and most 
people that are using Bosco and its derivatives are building from 
source, but there may be a bit of a muddle if I get around to updating 
Alpaca before this issue is resolved in OpenMCL (to my knowledge, 
Alpaca is the only Bosco-derived application with users who don't build 
from source).

For the moment, the Clotho IDE is unchanged.

I've done some recent work on the build system for the Cocoa backend 
for McCLIM, and that work will also go into Clotho shortly. The major 
practical effect of the work is that the build process copies the 
Darwin interface databases into the built application bundle in a way 
that makes the Objective C bridge independent of the Lisp development 
system. To explain a little more fully: in old versions of 
Bosco-derived applications, you needed a copy of OpenMCL with the 
darwin-headers directory if you wanted to use the Objective C bridge 
interactively. That meant that, for example, Clotho and Alpaca could 
not use the macros and functions of the Objective C bridge unless the 
system on which they were deployed also had a copy of OpenMCL, with the 
darwin-headers directory where the app expected to find it. The new 
build system makes built applications more independent of their build 
environments by bundling a copy of the interfaces into the application 
itself. That means that you can, for example, expect to copy Clotho 
onto a new machine without a pre-existing copy of OpenMCL, and expect 
the Objective C bridge to work.

Duncan got the McCLIM listener mostly up and functioning, albeit with 
significant cosmetic and autorelease-pool issues, and we're hacking on 
it in a privately-shared cvs repository until we get the go-ahead to 
commit it to the McCLIM repo. It might be a good idea for us to wait a 
bit longer before checking in, though, until I can get the overhaul 
done on Bosco and propagate the changes to Clotho and McCLIM.app. That 
way the checked-in McCLIM code will be based on a released version of 
OpenMCL.

That's it from IDE land. If you're interested in working on either 
project (Clotho, the Cocoa-centric Lisp IDE, or McCLIM.app, the Cocoa 
backend for McCLIM), please drop me a line and I'll explain how to get 
started working on the code.

--me