Progress on the IDE projects:

First, Gary Byers has released a new version of OpenMCL, version 0.14.1. This release has many bugfixes, better behavior with ANSI-compliance tests, and a major step forward in the Objective C bridge. On the other hand, it also means that Cocoa-related code, including Bosco and its derivatives, including both Clotho and the Cocoa backend for McCLIM, need overhauls to work with the new release. I intend to perform this overhaul as soon as possible; the current version of Bosco and its derivatives depend on the features in a range of CVS snapshots of 0.14, and that's undesirable. I think it's important to get them moved onto the released version as soon as possible.

The new features of the Objective C bridge have many positive qualities (most important being that Objective C classes are now also CLOS classes), but the new code also introduces a problem for delivery of binaries: saved images are OSX-version-specific. In other words, if you build an application on Jaguar then it probably won't run on Panther, and vice versa. I believe this is a temporary situation, and most people that are using Bosco and its derivatives are building from source, but there may be a bit of a muddle if I get around to updating Alpaca before this issue is resolved in OpenMCL (to my knowledge, Alpaca is the only Bosco-derived application with users who don't build from source).

For the moment, the Clotho IDE is unchanged.

I've done some recent work on the build system for the Cocoa backend for McCLIM, and that work will also go into Clotho shortly. The major practical effect of the work is that the build process copies the Darwin interface databases into the built application bundle in a way that makes the Objective C bridge independent of the Lisp development system. To explain a little more fully: in old versions of Bosco-derived applications, you needed a copy of OpenMCL with the darwin-headers directory if you wanted to use the Objective C bridge interactively. That meant that, for example, Clotho and Alpaca could not use the macros and functions of the Objective C bridge unless the system on which they were deployed also had a copy of OpenMCL, with the darwin-headers directory where the app expected to find it. The new build system makes built applications more independent of their build environments by bundling a copy of the interfaces into the application itself. That means that you can, for example, expect to copy Clotho onto a new machine without a pre-existing copy of OpenMCL, and expect the Objective C bridge to work.

Duncan got the McCLIM listener mostly up and functioning, albeit with significant cosmetic and autorelease-pool issues, and we're hacking on it in a privately-shared cvs repository until we get the go-ahead to commit it to the McCLIM repo. It might be a good idea for us to wait a bit longer before checking in, though, until I can get the overhaul done on Bosco and propagate the changes to Clotho and McCLIM.app. That way the checked-in McCLIM code will be based on a released version of OpenMCL.

That's it from IDE land. If you're interested in working on either project (Clotho, the Cocoa-centric Lisp IDE, or McCLIM.app, the Cocoa backend for McCLIM), please drop me a line and I'll explain how to get started working on the code.

--me