A Free and Portable Common-Lisp/Objective-C Bridge
Objective-CL is an Objective-C bridge that strives to be portable both across Common Lisp implementations and operating systems. Currently, it has been confirmed to work under Mac OS X/Cocoa/PowerPC and Linux/GNUstep/x86, but it is expected to work on many more platforms without major changes. (Testers welcome!)
23. Mar 2008 / 9. Dis 3174 | Objective-CL 0.2.2 released. This release is a minor bugfix release with respect to 0.2.1.
Development diary published. You can keep up with Objective-CL development, design decisions, and opinionated rants about the competition by viewing the development diary. |
7. Mar 2008 / 66. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL 0.2.1 released. This release offers a bunch of bug fixes and other improvements.
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5. Mar 2008 / 64. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL 0.2.0 released.
This release is a major milestone on the way to 1.0.0. It features the
following changes:
I think this is an exciting release. |
11. Feb 2008 / 42. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL 0.1.1 released.
This release features the following changes:
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30. Jan 2008 / 30. Cha 3174 | Public mailing-lists (objective-cl-devel and objective-cl-announce) are now available. These are generously hosted by common-lisp.net. |
27. Jan 2008 / 27. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL 0.0.3 released. This release avoids building our own version of libffi if one can be found installed on the system. This is possibly important for compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5, which according to The Web includes its own version of libffi, (hopefully) guaranteed to be up-to-date and maximally compatible with the system it runs on. |
26. Jan 2008 / 26. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL 0.0.2 released. This release fixes a bug in the libffi build procedure on Mac OS X. |
26. Jan 2008 / 26. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL
0.0.1 released — and it's ASDF-installable. Simply
hack the following into your REPL: (asdf-install:install
:objective-cl) |
26. Jan 2008 / 26. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL now includes its own branch of libffi, imported from PyObjC 1.3.7. It is therefore now installable without building your own libffi first. |
26. Jan 2008 / 26. Cha 3174 | Objective-CL has been relicensed under the GNU LGPLv3 (formerly GNU GPLv3). This means that people merely using the library as opposed to merging parts of it into their own software need not open-source their creations. Modifications to the bridge itself must still be distributed under the terms of the LGPLv3 (if they are distributed at all; see the license itself for details). |
23. Nov 2007 / 65. Aft 3173 | This website is online. |
Reference documentation is provided. A manual is planned but has not yet been written.
If you don't want to mess around:
(asdf-install:install :objective-cl)
If you want to get the latest and greatest:
git clone https://git.benkard.de/mulk/objective-cl.git
If all you need is working Cocoa support under Mac OS X, you ought to take a look at Clozure CL, which has been out in the wild for much longer than Objective-CL. Actual Cocoa applications have been written using Clozure CL. On the other hand, Clozure CL does not try to support GNUstep in any way, and it's probably easier to get involved with a young and small project such as Objective-CL if helping out is what you want.
CL-OBJC is another incomplete, free Objective-C bridge that tries to be compiler-independent. It hasn't got any support for GNUstep, however, and even on Mac OS X, it is currently (Dec 2007) limited to Tiger/x86, although Leopard support is being worked on. It also lacks proper support for memory management and exception handling. In contrast to Objective-CL, on the other hand, it has some support for struct creation and manipulation.
Please feel free to contact me (Matthias Benkard) by e-mail (first-name@last-name.de -- my first and last names being Matthias and Benkard, respectively) if you have any questions or would like to help out in some way. Alternatively, you can participate in the objective-cl-devel mailing-list.