| 1 | <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
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| 2 | <html>
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| 3 | <head>
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| 4 | <title>The (preliminary) Cocoa-based development environment for OpenMCL</title>
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| 5 | </head>
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| 6 |
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| 7 | <body>
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| 8 | <h1>The (still preliminary) Cocoa-based development environment for OpenMCL</h1>
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| 9 | <h2>General information</h2>
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| 10 | <p>
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| 11 | The OpenMCL Cocoa demo's been around for over a year; a variety
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| 12 | of things have kept it from moving forward:
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| 13 | </p>
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| 14 | <ol>
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| 15 | <li>
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| 16 | <p>
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| 17 | It was difficult (in some cases, impossible) to get Cocoa's
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| 18 | runtime system and OpenMCL's cooperative threads to interact
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| 19 | reasonably.
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| 20 | </p>
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| 21 | </li>
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| 22 | <li>
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| 23 | <p>
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| 24 | The demo code was written using a set of reader macros and
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| 25 | other constructs that made it possible to sort of embed
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| 26 | Objective-C like code in lisp. (It was actually a bit worse
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| 27 | than writing Objective-C code, since there was absolutely
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| 28 | nothing in the way of compile-time type- or sanity-checking
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| 29 | going on; the code was all effectively written at the lowest
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| 30 | level of OpenMCL's ffi.
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| 31 | </p>
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| 32 | <p>
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| 33 | The code's (almost ...) all rewritten using a Lisp-to-ObjC
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| 34 | bridge package developed and contributed by Randall Beer.
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| 35 | The bridge offers a lot of features that make Cocoa programming
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| 36 | in OpenMCL saner, safer, and Lispier than it had been; it's
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| 37 | a good thing, and seems to be an important step towards
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| 38 | closer integration of CLOS and ObjC.
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| 39 | </p>
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| 40 | </li>
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| 41 | <li>
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| 42 | <p>
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| 43 | There was a proof-of-concept example that showed how it was
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| 44 | possible to save the demo IDE as a double-clickable bundled
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| 45 | application. A lot of the steps involved in that process
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| 46 | had to be performed manually, and the result wasn't too
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| 47 | usable ...
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| 48 | </p>
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| 49 | </li>
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| 50 | </ol>
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| 51 | <p>
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| 52 | These issues have been addressed to a large degree; the demo
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| 53 | IDE's still barely usable (neither the editor nor the listener
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| 54 | windows are particularly lisp-aware, a lot of development and
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| 55 | debugging tools are missing, etc.) but I think that the foundation
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| 56 | for building this stuff is significantly stronger than it was.
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| 57 | </p>
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| 58 | <p>
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| 59 | All of this is (obviously) MacOSX-specific. The <a
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| 60 | href=http://www.gnustep.org>GNUstep Project</a> is trying to
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| 61 | provide a cross-platform, opensourced version of OPENSTEP (and
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| 62 | therefore a potentially high degree of compatibility with Cocoa.)
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| 63 | It might therefore be possible to port some of this to GNUstep
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| 64 | and Linux; I don't know how much would be involved in that.
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| 65 | </p>
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| 66 |
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| 67 | <h2>Random technical issues & to-do list</h2>
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| 68 |
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| 69 | <h3>Lisp-awareness</h3>
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| 70 | <p>
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| 71 | The demo IDE's listener and editor windows are slightly
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| 72 | customized versions of Cocoa's NSTextView class; the underlying
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| 73 | editor buffers are accessed as "attributed strings". There's no
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| 74 | support for lisp-syntax-aware navigation in NSTextView buffers,
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| 75 | and adding that support at the "attributed string" level would
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| 76 | seem to be a tedious, error-prone process.
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| 77 | </p>
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| 78 | <p>
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| 79 | I think that it'll be possible to effectively replace the
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| 80 | Cocoa text system's buffering mechanism with Lisp data structures
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| 81 | (e.g., PHemlock buffers), and continue to use the Cocoa text
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| 82 | system for display, scrolling, selection, and raw event handling.
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| 83 | </p>
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| 84 |
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| 85 | <h3>Modularity</h3>
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| 86 | <p>
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| 87 | There's code in the demo IDE that's very specific to the IDE
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| 88 | application itself; some other code probably needs to be
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| 89 | in any (hypothetical) OpenMCL-based Cocoa application. This
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| 90 | obviously needs to be refactored a bit.
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| 91 | </p>
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| 92 | <p>
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| 93 | The bundle directory used by the demo IDE ("ccl:OpenMCL.app")
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| 94 | is something that I originally created in ProjectBuilder a
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| 95 | long time ago. It'd be nice (and probably not too hard)
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| 96 | if there was a simple way to create skeletal bundle hierarchys
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| 97 | that could be populated and customized to create other types
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| 98 | of applications, and if the lisp (in various ways) helped
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| 99 | to support this process.) There are obviously lots of things
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| 100 | that could be done here ...
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| 101 | </p>
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| 102 |
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| 103 | <hr>
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| 104 | <!-- Created: Sun Jun 2 22:37:21 MDT 2002 -->
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| 105 | <!-- hhmts start -->
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| 106 | Last modified: Mon Sep 1 19:54:26 MDT 2003
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| 107 | <!-- hhmts end -->
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| 108 | </body>
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| 109 | </html>
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