vote (sorry for the first)

[Marc Domenig <domenig@urz.unibas.ch>]

John Lewis wrote:

>1. (Mac vs. cross platform).  CLIM already exists and addresses the
>   cross-platform community.  I vote for a more mac-centric application
>   framework which should be suitable for 'commercial' quality applications.
>
>2. (CLIM/Dylan/Bedrock/...).  A vote for 'roll our own', and port it to
>   Dylan when available.  (The designers of the app framework should
>   decide whether or not CLIM is suitable for an industrial quality
>   environment).
>
>3. (Other OS).  The operating system/platform competition has never been
>   more open than it is now; I'm waiting before deciding.
>
>   I hope Apple makes available a quasi public domain Dylan for porting
>   purposes.  I would like to see Dylan on some Unix machines.


I agree with John Lewis in many respects:

a more mac-centric framework could be developed quickly. A cross-platform
thing would mean that a lot of effort would have to be put into
compatibility issues and the merging of different "philosophies" which
don't really match very well. Moreover, John's argument about the
OS system/platform competition (more open than ever) is valid for
the framework question as well. Therefore, I vote for a clean
but powerful framework suitable for 'commercial' quality applications.

A further point: concentrating on the Mac would allow the development
team to focus on areas where

1) the Mac has either great advantages over other systems (which would
   create difficulties for a cross-platform framework because of the
   'least common denominator' problem), and

2) MCL (and the Mac) have weaknesses in comparison to other systems,
   e.g. in high-level support for multitasking, networking, RPC etc.

Marc Domenig