No MCL Reunion Plans

Alexander Repenning on info-mcl:

So, the good news is that we can do amazing things in Lisp and they even run very efficiently. The bad news is that at a time when Apple is doing really well and producing some pretty exciting hardware we have reached a new low in terms of Lisp development. Regarding MCL / OpenMCL we are all a bit frustrated here. We do not want to have to pick between Intel & SLIME versus PPC & real IDE. What is keeping MCL and OpenMCL from reuniting into a really useful version of Lisp for the Mac? At a technical level, what went wrong with MCL's compiler that it cannot produce code working at least with Rosetta? How com the LispWorks stuff works with Rosetta, can produce PPC, Intel and even Universal Binaries working on ALL Intel Macs? From a business point of view, why can Hazem not let go of a company that does no longer appear to be viable?

Clozure's Andrew Shalit responds:

There is no current collaborative relationship between Clozure and Digitool, beyond Clozure's hosting the mailing list.

[...]

We don't have plans to reunite them.

As for the future of OpenMCL:

We've recently been able to put more resources into OpenMCL development. The command-line (non-GUI) version of OpenMCL now runs on Linux, Free BSD and OS X, supporting PPC and 64-bit Intel processors. We hope to have a 32-bit Intel port at some point, but we don't have anything to announce about that today.

Gary Byers has written an Objective-C interface that allows you to write Cocoa applications for the Mac in OpenMCL. This is not as simple as the MCL carbon interface was, but that's mostly a result of the fact that Cocoa is a much more complete object-oriented framework, and we are providing complete access to it: you can add Lisp methods to Objective C objects, you can subclass across the languages, etc. For those who want something simpler, we are working on an example library that provides a quick-and-easy gui programming interface along the lines of what MCL offered.

We have used the Cocoa tools to create a GUI-based IDE for OpenMCL on the Mac. The IDE is approaching beta quality and we intend to keep putting resources into it as much as we can. It's not the same as the MCL IDE, but we think Macintosh people will be happy with it. It's a real Macintosh app. This currently runs on PPC Macs, and it will run on 64-bit Intel Macs as soon as Leopard is released. (Leopard is required to run Cocoa as a 64-bit process.)