Some heretic thoughts

[Dwight Hughes]

| From: Rainer Joswig <joswig@lavielle.com>
|
| At 20:00 Uhr +0200 07.06.1997, Thomas Fischbacher wrote:
| 
| >* We have to support X.
| 
| Maybe. My Symbolics does support X as client and server.
| The server is C code (slow). I rarely use the X server.
| The client code runs on multiple windowing systems -
| including X.

Hmmmm, another possible route.

| >* We cannot re-implement X from scratch.
| 
| This is true for a lot of other software. How
| would you deal with that. How does the Java
| community deal with that?

The JVM is native to whatever system it is on, with the
necessary hooks into the native GUI to use the AWT
widgets. The JVM is essentially the client-side code
you refer to above. 

Squeak Smalltalk defines its GUI and all its primitives
within the Squeak image and VM - it essentially just needs
to open a native GUI window and be able to paint to it
(even less than the JVM does).

| >* Build it on top of a Unix kernel?
| 
| Please - as few Unix as possible. I prefer **no** Unix.
| I'd like to see Lisp as a systems programming language.

Yes, definitely.

| >Yes, such a hybrid system would be rather bloated,
| 
| To bloated for my taste. *If* you like to start with
| Unix I would prefer a clear strategy to get rid of Unix.
| But it would be difficult.
| 
| So, what *is* the User Interface for LispOS? A native
| windowing system? Elegant and easy to use?

Elegant and easy to use primarily. Native on the "true"
LispOS of course. The Photon microGUI is based on one of
cleanest programming models I've seen - you might want to
check it out:

http://www.qnx.com/product/photon/photonindex.html

Their GUI interface itself is fairly standard.

-- Dwight