
Mocl: Common Lisp for iPhone/iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms - lispm
http://wukix.com/mocl
======
codewright
The announcement speaks as if web applications in Common Lisp was itself a
solved problem.

The community surrounding that isn't exactly vibrant.

An example from an attempt to find a viable/nice Common Lisp templating
library for making web apps (a problem for me before, I hate CL-WHO. Vile.)

[http://www.cl-
user.net/asp/U5Hd/sdataQGW2OvQLz758DQdX8yMX8yB...](http://www.cl-
user.net/asp/U5Hd/sdataQGW2OvQLz758DQdX8yMX8yBX8yBXnMq=/sdataQu3F$sSHnB==)

Hrm. Yes. Hrm. Seems promising, exceeeept...

<https://groups.google.com/group/cl-terrace/web/djula>

The Google Group for it has...disappeared?

<http://common-lisp.net/project/bpm/darcs/djula/>

Yay, code!

That hasn't been touched since 2008!

CL-WHO, which I _think_ is the most popular way to solve this problem hasn't
been touched in 2 to 7 months, depending on how you measure it.

See here:

<https://github.com/edicl/cl-who>

The Ningle web framework for Clack, found here:
<https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle>

Not been touched in 4-8 months.

Caveman (clack framework): <https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman/> 4-8 months.

HTML-TEMPLATE hasn't been touched since Tue, 02 Dec 2008.

The most popular web server for CL, Hunchentoot hasn't been touched (based on
the darcs repo anyway) since Tue, 24 Aug 2010.

Take a look for yourself: <http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/ediware/>

The Common Lisp community is moribund at best.

I would _PREFER_ to use Common Lisp over, say, Clojure or Python however the
fact is that there just aren't enough people using it or maintaining web
development software for it to overcome the time expenditure trade-offs.

So, can we drop the triumphant tone as it concerns CL? Even Paul Graham tells
most people to just use Clojure.

~~~
PuercoPop
"The most popular web server for CL, Hunchentoot hasn't been touched (based on
the darcs repo anyway) since Tue, 24 Aug 2010."

That statement is just untrue, take a look yourself.
<https://github.com/edicl/hunchentoot/commits/master>

Also there is an active community in Japan from what I can gather from
github.com

They done cl-annot[1], which is a way to annotate functions with the @ syntax
from python. Clack[2], the WSGI-equivalent for cl. And the Caveman[3] and
Ningle[4] webframeworks.

[1]: <https://github.com/arielnetworks/cl-annot> [2]:
<https://github.com/fukamachi/clack> [3]:
<https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman> [4]:
<https://github.com/fukamachi/ningle>

~~~
codewright
I linked Ningle and Caveman in my post and mentioned Clack too. What's your
point?

They're relatively unmaintained and I still can't find a templating library
for CL that isn't _awful_.

------
natesm
I am a little skeptical of the platform portability. A high quality
application has _a lot_ of UI code. Then, if you're Doing It Right, on iOS,
you're probably going to use Core Data and/or iCloud for backend storage. For
networking, you need to manage the activity indicator, etc.

So it seems like there are two choices:

1\. There's a wrapper library on top of UIKit instead of straight bindings.
Not good, more levels of junk, and can't really provide access to the entirety
of the API since it doesn't 100% match with Android.

2\. It's platform portable... as long as you don't actually use any system
frameworks. In that case, it could be nice for games, I guess, but would it be
fast enough?

------
agentultra
I'm not jumping to any conclusions before I try it. I prefer CL over pretty
much any language given the choice. It is a fine tool for making software.
Having an in-point to writing native CL code for mobile devices sounds pretty
good and not too far off to be too good.

------
synchromesh
I wonder whether this is something built on top of either ECL or Gambit-C, or
something completely new? I'm certainly interested to find out more. ATM
Gambit-C is top of my list of "alternatives for Lisp on iOS & Android".

------
migfromparis
Awesome.how big do you think is the market ?

