Re: future MCL

[Rich Brandau <rjb1%sun@gte.com>]

  I wonder how many of the MCL users are familiar with GARNET.  GARNET is a
  public domain attempt at providing an interface development environment for
  common lisp.  It runs on most common lisps that have CLX.  The GARNET folks are
  currently trying to get a Macintosh port underway.  I'm just curious as to how
  much interest there would be in having such a port.  Anyone?

Well, I'm interested in the prerequisite:  Does CLX already run on
MCL?  I've never tried to compile it because I just assumed it was
hopeless without lots of work, but now that I think about it, it might
be worth doing -- although performance seems unpromising, even
compared to CLIM.

Garnet may be OK, but it's not as "standard" as CLIM.  And I wouldn't
exactly call it "public domain," given the legal hurdles CMU's lawyers
have set up for using it.  It also seems less powerful than CLIM,
though that's only based on my reading of the docs.

As for CLIM 2.0, it's crucial to the survival of MCL.  I hope ILA will
supply it and make piles of money from it.  They deserve it: Together
with its Dynamic Windows predecessor, it represents the best
user/program interface ideas I've seen, and showcases LISP's
development and runtime capabilities.  It provides a natural way to do
valuable things that *cannot* be done in a non-LISP environment.

While on the subject of future MCL, I'd very much like a multi-tasking
capability.  Perhaps it's already there -- it seems like it shouldn't
be too difficult to dispatch off the event queue, though I've never
tried digging that deep.  Have I overlooked something obvious?

-- Rich Brandau