top | item 5928829

Mocl – a Common Lisp implementation for mobile platforms

54 points| pavelludiq | 12 years ago |wukix.com

61 comments

order
[+] tomjen3|12 years ago|reply
At 200 bucks a license there isn't going to be more than a couple people who are ready to answer stack overflow questions about this, there isn't going to be a good plugin to most IDEs, the tooling support is going to be poor in general and there is going to be libraries for approximately nothing (yes I know, it takes a lot less time to write them in Lisp, but it still means you need to dive into the Oauth spec to work with Twitter, whereas I can just download a library for Java that works).

I say this as a huge fan of Lisp and there was a time where it made sense to buy a commercial compiler - that time has passed, because when you buy a compiler and a new language you are also buying into an ecosystem, and the more people that are in that ecosystem the better for you.

I can see maybe using Lisp to do some special parts of the program, but even then there is Chicken Scheme which is free and already have a bunch of eggs (extensions), oh and it compiles to C too.

[+] stray|12 years ago|reply
It's funny to me that people will happily spend $40 for a t-shirt, $100+ for a pair of shoes, $300 for an ounce of weed -- but ask them for $200 for a professional development tool and they won't budge.

I for one, think the price tag is reasonable.

[+] wukix|12 years ago|reply
"there is going to be libraries for approximately nothing"

You do realize this runs Common Lisp, right? There are plenty of Common Lisp libraries.

[+] st3fan|12 years ago|reply
Sounds like a cool project. But really, no documentation, no sample code, not even a whitepaper? Just a Buy Now button?

It probably isn't, but it sounds like a scam. Better put out some actual code to show that this is for real.

[+] wukix|12 years ago|reply
Hey, mocl creator here. I apologize for the minimal website. We are building it out as quickly as we can. Bit hectic with a fixed release date we were trying to meet (and did meet).

It is real, though. I gave a talk about it at ECLM 2013 http://weitz.de/eclm2013/.

[+] gryphon65|12 years ago|reply
Agreed. I'd be really interested in a good common lisp for mobile development but I need more to go on than a page with a buy button.
[+] avodonosov|12 years ago|reply
It has been released 30 minutes ago, so web page is a work in progress.
[+] alexscheelmeyer|12 years ago|reply
This is exactly what I am looking for and I would probably buy it if I had some reassurance that it would actually work. Where is the docs? The sample code? Proof of concept apps that can be downloaded from app stores? Fine print for what is allowed in the different licenses?
[+] contingencies|12 years ago|reply
Seems to me like LISP might defend itself as a mobile language through relative ease of GPU integration, given the parallelization possible through OpenCL/CUDA, the difficulties of using them with traditional languages, the mobile platforms' challenge of electrical power consumption, and the limits of CPU-based processing.
[+] wslh|12 years ago|reply
A little bit expensive and with no trial (no, I don't want to buy something to return it later).
[+] wukix|12 years ago|reply
mocl creator here. Trial version will be coming in the weeks ahead. Didn't have time to put it together yet. Sorry about that. We do accept returns though.
[+] pavelludiq|12 years ago|reply
It's actually cheap for a production ready(if it is) commercial cl implementation, but I agree, a trial version is essential.
[+] paines|12 years ago|reply
Nice, and congrats to the wukix Team for their effort. However, will Apple accept those apps in it's store? There was this guy who wrote a game in Gambit Scheme (iirc) and was rejected back then. This seems to be the same process here (generate C code from Lisp and glue it toether with GUI code), just with CL.
[+] rsanders|12 years ago|reply
Apple no longer cares what language you use, as long as new code isn't downloaded to distributed apps after installation. So it's okay to use CL as long as there is no facility for interpretation of CL downloaded from the net.
[+] octopus|12 years ago|reply
I think Apple will accept anything compiled with mocl. A similar project is RubyMotion (for Ruby obviously) and it seems to have no problem with Apple.
[+] rcb|12 years ago|reply
I'm very happy about mocl's release. Great work, and congratulations!
[+] yakov|12 years ago|reply
From language implementer perspective your ECLM slides are lame.

Is this ECL re-packaged you charge > $ 200 for without even giving a trial whatever? :-)

[+] flyingbeaver|12 years ago|reply
could you only put a gist with the code of a hello world application ?

Like AppDelegate and a label with hello world in it ?

[+] mark_l_watson|12 years ago|reply
Looks very interesting!

Some blog articles showing development of sample applications would also be nice :-)

[+] jbp|12 years ago|reply
Is this same as Gambit-c or Chicken scheme, but for CL?
[+] octopus|12 years ago|reply
If what you ask is if mocl compiles to C first (like Chicken and Gambit), than yes. It is the same.
[+] clubhi|12 years ago|reply
I'm going to assume a few things here...

- No one has ever used this. - It is filled with bugs and has no full time developers supporting it. - It is extremely limited. - The benchmarks are completely false.

I'd buy something like this if it didn't look like a good rich scheme.