Re: [Caml-list] OCaml && COCOA-Environment (Mac-OS-X/GUI)

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

Hi,

I had looked shortly at the code... but it seems I have to learn a lot
more of OCaml-C-Binding-stuff as well as Objective-C.
So I started to learn again Objective-C in more detail.

As far as I can see, the Classes of the Cocoa-Lib are very
powerful!!!

I will start to write some small Applications in Objective-C under OS-X
as soon as possible. But bigger stuff I would prefer to write in OCaml.

If I maybe will have enough experience with ObjC and COCOA,
I will try to marriage it with the Ocaml-C-binding (but this
is new to me too).

If I may have some time to visit the code,  or to test it with
expermimental programs, I can look into it.
But now it seems to me, that I have to learn the basics of these
different worlds in more detail.

I came from ANSI-C and have done the most work on Linux. Then I have done
a lot of Perl-programming on Linux too.

But the Mac-OS-World is different (but very impressing, what they are doing
there... they seem to have a lot of that NeXt-Step-Stuff integrated into OS-X!)


I hope that there are some more people out there who are
interested to - maybe - start a project to integrate
COCOA and OCaml. It seems to me, that a powerful library for
OS-X-GUI (COCOA) for OCaml could be a nice thing for many people.

Are there more OS-X developers or are there more OCaml-developers?
And how many OCaml-developers are working at OS-X?
And if there woule be such a binding... ?!

Best regards....
       ... I hope to have enough time for doing more ObjC...


Ciao,
   Oliver


On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 01:04:20PM -0800, Paul Snively wrote:
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> On Feb 5, 2005, at 11:51 AM, Mike Hamburg wrote:
> 
> >Additionally, I developed a very rudimentary binding.  It allowed the 
> >user to call Cocoa methods from O'Caml, but it had an enormous 
> >overhead: each method invocation from O'Caml had the overhead of about 
> >5 method calls from the C glue.  There was a (somewhat more efficient) 
> >Cocoa-to-O'Caml call method, but I don't remember if I ever finished 
> >it.
> >
> >Paul Snively, Nick Burlett and I were working on a more efficient 
> >bridge, by means of parsing Cocoa headers to automatically generate 
> >typed bindings which would look like objects to O'Caml, but the 
> >project fizzled without any real results.  Perhaps someone with more 
> >FrontC knowledge could resurrect it.  The existing code is not 
> >strongly typed: you can attempt to pass the wrong number or type of 
> >arguments to a method, and it will raise an O'Caml exception instead 
> >of rejecting it at compile time.
> >
> >The O'Caml-to-Cocoa bridge is not online, but I can send you what code 
> >we have if you want.
> >
> Mea culpa. I'm still very interested. I can't help but think that 
> extending Jeff Henrikson's Forklift FFI to handle Objective-C and 
> marrying that to an (improved? revised?) version of your bindings 
> wouldn't be a big win, but I confess to having no real roadmap for how 
> to get there, and my Copious Free Time(tm) is rather torn between 
> wanting to get O'Caml going natively on OS X and wanting to plow 
> through TAPL and now ATITAPL and master MetaPRL and concentrate on 
> learning how to design modern programming languages.
> 
> But at the very least, I'd love to see the current state of your code. 
> :-)
> 
> >Mike Hamburg
> >
> Many thanks and best regards,
> Paul
> 
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-- 
"Here at michigan state university, my computational linguistics professor
 had us learn ocaml for the class and we used it exclusively. I like it so
 much better than c++! Hope this helps." (Jeff Shaw on caml-list)