[armedbear-devel] RFC: Autoloading and "multi-homed symbols"

[Ville Voutilainen]

On 1 August 2012 15:34, Blake McBride <blake at mcbride.name> wrote:
> Greetings,
> I understand the problem - at least to a degree.  With user code, not part
> of the boot process, I would think that I wouldn't rely too much on lisp
> magically knowing what to do in complex situations (where different methods
> are attached to the same generic).  Rather, I would push the problem to the
> application programmer.  It is his responsibility to make sure everything
> gets loaded and in the correct order.

I agree 100%. I don't think it's possible to automate that, and it's not hard at
all to imagine realistic scenarios where a magical autoload will almost always
fail (plugins come to mind, user code decides what to load based on some
condition, if an autoload goes and loads things based on some magical
scanning, trouble ensues).

For abcl internals, automating things would be nice, but I wonder whether we
need to help the infrastructure by providing require/provide hints, as
suggested,
rather than have it magically-automatic.