Saturday, October 14, 2006

Common Lisp IDE built on Eclipse

I know some people don't like the dated user interface of Emacs, so Cusp might be interesting. This is a plugin for Eclipse which uses the same backend (Swank) as SLIME for Emacs and provides similar features, however at this point it looks a lot less mature than SLIME.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

My problem with Emacs is not a "dated-looking" interface. The problem is how clunky the interface is because it's basically a console application and is limited by that.

It's too bad that nobody ever got a crossplatform editor written in CL with a modern toolkit (maybe bindings to the C part of SWT).

Eclipse is a slick and very modular environment. I've got the eclipseFP plugin for Haskell and now this Lisp plugin. It's just too bad that it's developed in Java.

Anonymous said...

Why is it "too bad" that eclipse is a Java program?

Anonymous said...

Why is it "too bad" that eclipse is a Java program?

I don't have a problem with Eclipse "being" a Java program. My problem is that I don't want to have to write Java to write plugins for it.

Technically, you don't. But Java (the language)is still the first-class citizen for writing Eclipse plugins.

As it turned out, .NET spanks the JVM on the number of interesting languages that target it.

Boo, Nemerle, F#, IronPython, a new Ruby compiler

compared to Groovy, an interpreted JRuby, a defunct Nice. Well Java does have Scala. And a new Haskell-like language called CAL.

But if I was someone of importance at Sun, I'd be embarrassed that .NET has turned out to be the interesting platform for alternative languages.

Maybe open-sourcing Java will change things. Who knows.

Slava Pestov said...

dave: The Climacs editor is an Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp using the McCLIM toolkit.

Unlike Emacs they're only aiming to have powerful text editing features, without the "kitchen sink" approach. Instead they integrate with other McCLIM applications. I like this.

http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/

Anonymous said...

Slava, yes I'm aware of both Climacs and Hemlock. Unfortunately, McCLIM is nowhere close to being cross-platform, and from what I hear, not quite there on its target platforms.

From what I've seen, CLIM is a monsterous spec and somewhat foreign to most programmers.

I still think something like CL-SWT would be the way to go. I guess CAPI might be interesting, but that seems to be owned by LispWorks.