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

[Scott McKay]

On Dec 19, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Daniel Herring wrote:

> 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.
> 

But what I am saying is, use something that supports versioned
wire protocols, and instead of willy-nilly changing the existing
API frequently, change it in constrained ways, increment a version
number, and use a new version of the wire protocol.

Yes, it's work.


> [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