[kpax-devel] Re: kpax error

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

Alex,

On 11 Feb 2006, at 23:29, Alexander Rose wrote:

> Hello Sven,
>
> Am 11.02.2006 um 20:27 schrieb Sven Van Caekenberghe:
>> Where did you find the version of CMUCL that you are using - maybe  
>> I can quickly try it myself ?
> It's release cmucl-19b-ppc-darwin. I got it from an official  
> mirror, e.g. http://ftp.isr.ist.utl.pt/pub/MIRRORS/cmucl/

I installed CMUCL 19b on my machine and tried loading some of my  
packages and KPAX using ASDF.
In the file kpax.asd there is a logical pathname translation for HOME  
being added, which fails on CMUCL.
So I conditionalized it out - this was checked in and I did a new  
release.

> I just tried it with the 19c release. The error message is slightly  
> different. I attached it.
>
>> Last time I checked, CMUCL on Mac OS X did not have  
>> multiprocessing/multithreading, which is (obviously) required for  
>> KPAX (through S-SYSDEPS), but maybe there is progress on that front ?
> The manual says: "2.20 Lisp Threads: CMUCL supports Lisp threads  
> for the x86 platform."
> So what does it mean? I could start a server with s-http-server,  
> which also depends on S-SYSDEPS, doesn't it?

Well, any multi threaded web server needs threads ;-) Indeed, S-HTTP- 
SERVER seems to work at first sight, but that is because there are  
some sensible defaults in S-SYSDEPS that result in S-HTTP-SERVER  
working as a single threaded server, which is OK for very simple usage.

KPAX has slightly more complex examples for which most browsers issue  
multiple concurrent requests, hence you need a multi threaded server.

As I said before: S-SYSDEPS is not completely ported to CMUCL and  
above that CMUCL on Mac OS X does not have multi threading which is  
required. So you are out of luck with CMUCL, and SBCL for that  
matter, on Mac OS X. OpenMCL should work, but I haven't tried that in  
a long time.

>> Personally, I am a LispWorks on Mac OS X user, for which there is  
>> free trial version.
> Maybe it's worth a try, but i am so comfortable with emacs.

Give it a try, LispWorks' editor looks and feels enough like Emacs to  
fool casual users. If you really want, you can run SWANK in LispWorks  
and connect from your regular Emacs using SLIME. Another option (but  
not with the free version) is to make a TTY image and use that under  
Emacs+SLIME.

There are so much nice tools in LispWorks' IDE (like the debugger and  
stepper, but there are many more) that once you really get to known  
them, you will never want to go back - at least that is how I feel  
it: I still use and like Emacs+SLIME (for example on Linux), and  
SLIME does have some unique features, but I am much more productive  
in LispWorks.

>> There is now a new mailing list for KPAX called KPAX-DEVEL:
> Ok, I will use it.

Welcome!

Sven