Mocl – a Common Lisp implementation for mobile platforms

http://wukix.com/mocl?hn

by pavelludiq • 13 years ago

54 61 13 years ago

wukix.com

avodonosov2• 13 years ago

interesting

st3fan• 13 years ago

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.

gryphon65• 13 years ago

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.

avodonosov2• 13 years ago

It has been released 30 minutes ago, so web page is a work in progress.

wukix7• 13 years ago

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/.

dubcanada• 13 years ago

Then why even release it? You're releasing a new "coding method" for mobile platforms with no documentation, no sample code, no example applications, no benchmark backups.

Nobody is going to hand over $200 without at least some of those items listed above. So it just seems a bit strange to even want to release it.

I'm just saying you should slow down a little bit, take a look at http://www.rubymotion.com/ for example. It's the same sort of thing, Ruby for iOS. They provide both examples, publicly available documentation, they even have a way to try it out yourself and see what it looks like.

pyvpx• 13 years ago

congrats on reaching your deadline, but now you've shot yourself in the foot in another way by tarnishing the..."brand", for want of a better term. you can pat yourself on the back for hitting your target date without having to prematurely publicly release the whole thing.

wslh2• 13 years ago

A little bit expensive and with no trial (no, I don't want to buy something to return it later).

pavelludiq3• 13 years ago

It's actually cheap for a production ready(if it is) commercial cl implementation, but I agree, a trial version is essential.

wslh2• 13 years ago

The same applies to a lot of software. If you just speed up a few hours then the ROI is very high.

BUT from the commercial perspective you must follow some "commercial software standards". You can even lose customers because the commercial proposal is far from the standard and "against" the customer.

This comment was downvoted without a reply

tbirdz2• 13 years ago

However, note that most commercial lisp implementations, such as LispWorks, Allegro CL each have a free (gratis, not libre), albeit limited, personal/noncommercial edition as well as evaluation and trial licenses for their other versions.

wukix7• 13 years ago

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.

mark_l_watson3• 13 years ago

I am not sure that a trial version is really necessary if you provide several solid complete examples (source, build setup for both platforms) and pre-built apps for the demos that we could try on our Android and iOS devices.

alexscheelmeyer2• 13 years ago

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?

wukix7• 13 years ago

Documentation, and a little bit of sample code is included in the download. The license agreement is viewable at http://wukix.com/mocl-license-agreement.

alexscheelmeyer2• 13 years ago

With fine print I meant answer to questions like "what do I get in a commercial license that I do not get in a personal license?" as it is written it could mean that with a personal license you are not allowed to earn money from apps, or it could mean that it would only cover a single developer (then how many developers do I get for the commercial license?)

Also by actually reading that license it seems to contradict what you promise elsewhere, it says: "All fees shall be non-refundable".

cscurmudgeon• 13 years ago

Can you guys provide something to look at before I pay? A free but limited version like Lispworks will be ideal and may increase your numbers.

clubhi• 13 years ago

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.

regularfry• 13 years ago

So is this based on an existing CL implementation, or a totally greenfield project?

espadrine• 13 years ago

It compiles to C; there is no JIT/bytecode/interpreter. It may be created from scratch.

http://wukix.com/dist/mocl_eclm2013.pdf

yakov• 13 years ago

From language implementer perspective your ECLM slides are lame.

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

muhuk• 13 years ago

Clojure on Android: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NptqU3bqZE

octopus3• 13 years ago

You do realize that Clojure is not Common Lisp ?

That being said, the linked video is from 2011 (published in 2013, but from 2011).

Mikeb852• 13 years ago

Clojure isn't Common Lisp, but it's A Lisp, and a pretty decent one...

flyingbeaver• 13 years ago

could you only put a gist with the code of a hello world application ?

Like AppDelegate and a label with hello world in it ?

tomjen33• 13 years ago

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.

wukix7• 13 years ago

"there is going to be libraries for approximately nothing"

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

tomjen33• 13 years ago

Maybe. CL has a bunch of different implementations that are slightly incompatible and some of the libraries (or their dependencies) have to be chased down on obscure FTP sites that haven't been updated in a long time.

Don't get me wrong, as a language is it the best that I know of. As an environment, it is not.

pavelludiq3• 13 years ago

the eclim talk mentions that many CL libraries work with it so maybe https://github.com/fons/cl-twitter or https://github.com/skypher/cl-oauth will work?

Anyway, lispworks seems to be doing fine selling their lisp, so maybe it isn't hopeless for wukix :)

reeses• 13 years ago

Competitive acquisitions often result from this kind of development.

stray2• 13 years ago

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.

rayiner• 13 years ago

I'm totally willing to pay for a great professional development tool. However, I think it's way too risky to use a closed source niche product in this day and age. I would have preferred something like the Ravenbrook licensing model: a viral open source license that would necessitate a commercial license to create derivative products or develop commercial applications.

evincarofautumn• 13 years ago

The thing is that it’s easier to predict the personal value of a real-world item. You don’t know in advance whether you’re going to get $200 of value out of a particular development product, because there’s no reasonable standard of comparison.

You would pay $40 for a T-shirt if it were some sort of collector’s item you could resell. You would pay $100 for running shoes because that’s less than $15000 for knee surgery, and you like having comfy feet. You would pay $150–300 for an ounce of weed because you know what weed is like, and you like it, and the price is driven up by legal issues. But what justification can you come up with for spending $200 on what is essentially a productivity tool, if it won’t necessarily make you more productive?

dktbs• 13 years ago

For me, it isn't the price tag that is a problem. It is the lack of information about something that has a price tag. I would personally be interested in a product like this, and I have paid $200+ for development software before, but there isn't enough info here to let me know if it is worth it.

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Fully agree, I still remember the days I had to pay for every single piece of software I was using.

Nowadays there seems to exist a trend developers should work for free.

mark_l_watson3• 13 years ago

Looks very interesting!

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

rcb• 13 years ago

I'm very happy about mocl's release. Great work, and congratulations!

contingencies• 13 years ago

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.

jbp• 13 years ago

Is this same as Gambit-c or Chicken scheme, but for CL?

octopus3• 13 years ago

If what you ask is if mocl compiles to C first (like Chicken and Gambit), than yes. It is the same.

paines• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

octopus3• 13 years ago

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.

Mocl – a Common Lisp implementation for mobile platforms

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