A Free Implementation of CLIM
Robert I. Strandh, H Timothy Moorey · 2002
McCLIM is a free implementation of the Common Lisp Interface Man-gager, or CLIM, specication. In this paper we review the distinguishing features of CLIM, describe the McCLIM implementation, recount some of the history of the McCLIM eort, give a status report, and contemplate future directions. McCLIM is a portable implementation of the Common Lisp Interface Man-gager, or CLIM, specication[9] released under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). CLIM was originally conceived as a library for bringing advanced fea-tures of the Symbolics Genera system[3], such as presentations, context sensitive input, sophisticated command processing, and interactive help, to Common Lisp implementations running on stock hardware. The CLIM 2.0 specication added \\look-and-feel " support so that CLIM applications could adopt the appearance and behavior of native applications without source code changes. Several Lisp vendors formed a consortium in the late 80s to share code in a common CLIM implementation, but for a variety of reasons the visibility of CLIM has been limited in the Common Lisp community. The McCLIM project has created an implementation of CLIM that, in the summer of 2002, is almost feature complete. Initially created by merging several developers ' individual eorts, McCLIM is being used by several programs including a music editor, a web browser, and an IRC client (see Figure 1). Some non-graphic parts of CLIM have been adopted into the IMHO web server[2]. In this paper we review the distinguishing features of CLIM, describe the McCLIM implementation, recount some of the history of the McCLIM eort, give a stlatus report, and contemplate future directions for McCLIM. 1 CLIM Features and Concepts CLIM abstracts the input and output features of window systems in order to seperate the applications programmer, and the specication, from any particular system. Graphics are rendered on sheets, which correspond to most systems'