[Axiom-developer] RE: Boot vs. Lisp - various

[Bill Page]

On November 2, 2005 8:28 AM C Y wrote:

> ...
>>> Starting from BOOT I haven't got the faintest idea of how to
>>> proceed.  Lots of things like that will crop up over time,
>>> and Lisp already is working on the problem of being able to
>>> interface with a large number of foreign libraries via FFI.
>
> Bill Page wrote:
>> 
>> Exactly that issue came up in Kai Kaminski's work on Axiom UI.
>> In that case Kai choose initially to use an entirely separate
>> lisp process (in fact written in clisp rather than gcl because
>> of ansi compatibility) and to communicate with Axiom via a
>> pipe or socket.
> 
> Kai, did you do that because you wanted to avoid having to run
> the UI in the same thread as Axiom itself or because of toolkit
> limitations?
> 

I am sorry, I must retract one thing I wrote earlier. In the
quoted email on November 1, 2005 11:23 I went on to write:

>> But gradually and during the latter stages of his work he
>> discovered that he had to make changes in some boot code in
>> Axiom in order to support Scalable Vector Graphics in the
>> AxiomUI browser.

Sorry. I have reviewed my email and the archive that Kai produced
as part of the AxiomUI project and I see that what I wrote above
is wrong. During the AxiomUI project Kai did not write boot code
for the purpose I indicated but rather SPAD, although at several
times we did discuss the issue of boot vs. lisp.

You can see the pamphlet part of Kai's work online here:

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/axiom--GUI--1

(The missing parts in the lisplib folder are external lisp
modules.)

>> Now as gcl approaches full ansi compliance and after Axiom
>> is ported to the ansi standard (see another recent thread on
>> this subject), I wonder if Kai might have used a different
>> approach and written more in boot?

I would like to let this question stand and hope Kai has a few
moments available to commment.

It is interesting to notice that Kai does in fact make use of
lisp's asdf tools in the build script for this package.

Regards,
Bill Page.