Things to do before GUI-developers can start their work

--- Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> wrote:
> 
> But there are socket libraries out there already.  CLOCC has one.
> There's db-sockets (?).  Don't know how complete they are.

Hmm.  Well, I suppose if there's no other way...  That pretty much
rules out any of the advantages of having the GUI be native lisp
though.

> Hard.  Maybe very hard.  Might be able to port CMUCLs x86 threads to
> Solaris, which would make it easy for other platforms.  SBCL's
> threads for other platforms will be hard since it uses 
> Linux-specific stuff.

Would Windows be a whole 'nother can of worms?
 
> Yes, forgot about Garnet, which I have used before.  McCLIM does have
> an advantage because it was designed (I think) to handle the kinds of
> presentation that maxima would like to use.  Plus, McCLIM is actively
> developed now.  Garnet seems to be, uh, stagnant.

Fairly stagnant, but it's also fairly complete.  Plus, Dan has done
some work to get Garnet to talk to Windows, and achieved some success.
 
> This doesn't bother me because I'm not likely to continue computing
> without seeing the output of the previous command.  Plotting,
> however, could be a problem.  But I'm not likely to do anything until

> I see the plot either.

I suppose the way it could be handled would be to impliment it to take
advantage of threads if they are present, but if not do things in
series.  Then maybe as a third option access a remote kernel via
sockets or some other protocal, although the problem with that is
things like environment definitions, which could be taken for granted
as being defined if the same lisp process were used, will not be
communicated automatically via the socket and would have to be
communicated.  I guess the way to handle it would be to impliment some
sort of overriding checker that, if socket mode was enabled, queried
the Maxima kernel for settings information before any operation that
required it, and returned any results to the Maxima process.  I guess
all that needs some thought - there will be some things, like the
position of taskbars, that the kernel doesn't care about, but things
like font size and document width it will need to know about when
formatting results.

CY

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