On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Oliver Uvman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jesus! I thought I was the only one wanting to program CL on the OM. > I've had lots of interesting ideas on how to use a gesture-based > interface for writing CL, which could work only thanks to the sparse > syntax, and plan to make that some of the first things I program for > my OM. Hooray!
A couple of us Chicken Scheme people have run it on OpenMoko. Somebody needs to write the BitBake recipe for building Chicken and its "eggs" (extensions). (Maybe I will get around to that, but it's my first time, and I imagine enough things will go wrong that it will become frustrating, like BitBake often is.) The latest version I actually cross-compiled using the OpenMoko toolchain, so it's not hard. Then provided I have installed gcc and the other development stuff (headers, binutils, etc.) I can actually compile Scheme code right on the phone (slowly). I wrote (laid?) an "egg" to support DBus, and next I'm writing one to support gpsd. Likewise there will need to be another to support GSM functions, when that becomes stable enough (ideally it will only need the DBus interface, which would make it pretty trivial since the DBus egg provides the means). Those are components I needed for Display Scheme, which will be an alternative framebuffer-based GUI. DS will be a display server (like an X server) which (being a Scheme interpreter rather than an X-protocol interpreter) will allow you write client-server applications where the client code runs within the display server itself. (Or you can write client-only applications, but there are limitations, the big one being that Chicken does not support native threads, only lightweight threads. I'm thinking that message-passing between processes is the future on many-core systems anyway. So each app should be its own process.) It is the same model that was used for NeWS except Scheme replaces Postscript. I have a couple of very basic widgets working, and next need to work on IPC techniques so that it's possible to write client-server apps. Then when I have GSM and GPS apps working, maybe there could be some sort of early release (installable packages), but that's still fairly far out. Then after that I need to work on making the application-programming process as high-level and terse as possible. The main purpose of this project is to pursue my ideas about "metawidgets" (describe what the application should do, rather than exactly how to lay it out on the screen, because then it can be more portable). And apps can run on network-connected servers, of course, so using Scheme rather than HTML/Javascript/Flash will provide a solution to many of the problems the web-application folks are working on now, and much more efficiently. The client will be able to connect to the server via various transports like HTTP, SSH, plain sockets, maybe DBus, etc. Depending how much code the server "exports" to be run on the client (which may ultimately be a dynamic tradeoff, taking into account the available bandwidth and the processing power and memory on both ends), client-server apps could work offline too. Common Lisp isn't to my taste. But I imagine you can write a "compiler" that generates Scheme for the UI portions of your application, and then you'd be able to write applications in Common Lisp. Likewise in the distant future there should be some bindings for other languages like Python and C++. Chicken has the advantage that the apps can be compiled too, so not very much code is going to end up being interpreted: just the "glue" that is actually communicated across the connection between the server and client. Eventually maybe I could find a way for the client to ask the server to cross-compile code on its behalf, so that nothing would need to be interpreted. Now if only I had enough time to do all this stuff. :-) http://sourceforge.net/projects/dscm/ http://callcc.org/ http://chicken.wiki.br/cross-compilation _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
