Greeting all. My name is Cliff Yapp (a.k.a CY). I have three comments on the lisp graphical toolkit front:
a) LTK, McCLIM, CLG, and others all deserve consideration. There is a lot of work that has been done out there - the problem is (as always) that many solutions are isolated on one implementation or platform. Because of this, I would agree that LTK is the logical starting point for the gardners. b) Verrazano/CFFI is an ABSOLUTELY VITAL part of this process - all solutions not depending on CLX in the unix world will need an FFI to interact with a toolkit. FFIs MUST become universal across all lisp platforms. Also, a wealth of other abilities besides graphics can be used by lisp with this project. Verrazano/CFFI is in my estimation the single most important tool in the free lisp world today, provided it becomes universal. c) I would like to add the Garnet toolkit to this discussion - not as something that needs cleanup (yet) but as something to bear in mind and keep on the radar. It has the distinction (along with McCLIM) of depending only on CLX on unix. Of course the appearance of both McCLIM and Garnet leaves something to be desired, but they are the only two toolkits for Lisp that are themselves lisp, with only the minimum of underlying OS support. Garnet needs to be modernized and debugged, but it has a) EXCELLENT documentation and b) a surprisingly powerful and usable system for defining graphics. I am no expert in lisp anything yet but the design of the Garnet system seems to make quite a lot of sense, which is encouraging for other potential new users once it is made to look less like late 1980s GUIs. I think there will be room in the world for both McCLIM and Garnet, depending on the application. Garnet does not use CLOS but a custom system (which I find well suited to its job actually) so that's a drawback, but probably not a serious one. GUI development for universality is not a trivial task. I think a good first step would be to make available low level interfaces to Windows, MacOSX, and X graphics systems. In that department we have: X: clx. Lots of work to do there - xrender extension support, better keyboard handling, etc. etc. etc. Windows: gdi. This is currently in clisp - it's some work done by Dan Stanger to interface with the Windows low level drawing layer. It was intended to allow Garnet to work on Windows and achieved limited success - expansion of this could open up the Windows side of lisp graphics. Since it is clisp specific there is probably a lot of work to do for other lisps. OSX: cl-carbon, and/or a development of the Beagle backend from McCLIM. >From robust versions of these foundations both McCLIM and Garnet should be able to achieve cross platform status, with all graphics above the primitative level existing as lisp instructions. Of course, this leaves look and feel issues to be delt with, but that's a later phase. Cheers, Cliff __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
