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

[Mike Hamburg <hamburg@fas.harvard.edu>]

On Feb 6, 2005, at 9:24 PM, Oliver Bandel wrote:

> 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!!!

They are certainly quite powerful, but their garbage collection is 
reference-counted, which makes it rather painful.  The language is also 
extremely verbose, and has little support for higher-order functions.  
That's why I prefer to write in O'Caml, and largely why I wrote the 
O'Caml to Cocoa bridge in the first place.

> 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!)

Yes, OS X is essentially an improved NeXTSTEP, running on a Mach kernel 
with BSD bindings.  I've been quite impressed at what they managed to 
build on a UNIX, though... it blows KDE out of the water in most 
respects (in my opinion).

> 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.

Agreed.  What the project would need would be people familiar with FFI 
tools such as Forklift, as the existing bindings are not type-checked 
and are slow.

> 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

Mike Hamburg
>
> 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)
>
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