[pro] How to interact with a running lisp instance?

[Daniel Herring]

On Sun, 19 Dec 2010, Scott McKay wrote:
> On Dec 17, 2010, at 4:57 PM, aerique at xs4all.nl wrote:
>
>> On 17 dec 2010, at 22:15, Eli Naeher <enaeher at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Right now I usually have (under screen) one instance of Emacs for
>>> personal projects (for which I try to use the latest Slime and Swank)
>>> and one for work (where they do not get updated so frequently), and
>>> sometimes I need to start a third instance if I am doing work on an
>>> older maintenance branch of the software. It seems like there should
>>> be a way to switch between Slime versions within the same running
>>> Emacs, but I have yet to figure it out.
>>
>> Not a direct question to Eli, but why is Slime so version specific
>> anyway?
>>
>
> Ya have to wonder if Slime/Swank should be used Protocol Buffers
> or Thrift to do their RPC.  These both support versioned protocols,
> and it would be great to have a CL binding to Protocol Buffers.

As I understand it, the wire protocol is generally the stable part of 
Slime.  The RPC aspects (what the server commands do) is what has deep 
implications and changes frequently.

[aside] Protocol buffers are an unnecessarily complicated reinvention of 
the wheel.  If the big G wasn't using them, everyone would be using one of 
the preexisting formats (e.g. XDR).  See MapReduce for a related theme. 
IMO, a binding to Apache Camel or OpenSplice DDS would be much more 
interesting.

- Daniel