[mcclim-devel] McClim up and running

[christopher melen]

OK so I have McClim up and running on my Mac (PPC with
OS X 10.4.9). I've tried it with two Lisps so far,
OpenMCL (now Clozure CL) and SBCL. Some observations -

1. SBCL works best. I had some problems with the
listener under OpenMCL, especially when I tried to
change the path  (complained that it was 'not of type
LIST').
2. I have to run it with Apple's X11 - which is not a
problem for me, as I use it frequently, but I was
wondering if anyone's got it running without it. I had
to set the DISPLAY environment variable in my
.bash_profile to 127.0.0.1:0.0. So I have to run it
from the terminal or an xterm, not from Emacs Slime
(my preferred set-up).
3. When an app starts (for instance, the listener, or
Gsharp) it takes a while to 'come alive'. Menus aren't
usable for about a minute. After that it's OK, though,
and I can restart an app (in the same Lisp session)
without issue. I think I've only encountered this
problem with SBCL.
4. I have also tried to get McClim running on my
Windows box. I can compile it for Clisp (native Cygwin
version, haven't tried the Win32 port), but when I try
and run the Listener or any of the demos it just hangs
(even with Cygwin's X11 running). I have also tried
using the Win32 port of SBCL, but for some reason CLX
won't compile on that. Might give ACL a go, if I can
get ASDF to work properly with it. 
4. I am hoping to use McClim to build the gui for my
current project. I am keen to use it because of the
fact that it's Lisp all the way through, unlike other
Lisp-based gui kits (Ltk, cells-gtk, lispbuilder, for
example) which, while perhaps slicker, feel a bit
superficial (just wrappers for Tcl/Tk, Gtk, etc.). I
have been tempted to fork out for ACL or LispWorks,
but then there are licensing issues when it comes to
redistributing my application. So I really want to
stick with McClim.

Any thoughts/comments much appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris


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