[slime-devel] Re: [Ilisp-devel] SLIME

[Daniel Barlow]

Bill Clementson <bill_clementson at yahoo.com> writes:

> I found this comment curious as I thought that you
> used only a TCP socket to communicate between emacs
> and cl. I had a look at the source and you do require
> inferior lisp mode (ILM) and comint mode. What is the
> rationale for using both inferior lisp mode and a TCP
> socket? Is your intention to entirely replace ILM with
> socket communication or will you continue to use ILM
> for some things and sockets for others?

"Require" may be a bit of a strong word: it is possible to run SLIME
with only the TCP connection (e.g. to a lisp on another machine) but
you need to (swank:create-swank-server) on the CL by hand before
running slime-connect.  

That said, yes, if you run the default M-x slime it does use
inferior-lisp to start up a lisp implementation.  I think the plan
is to make inferior-lisp largely unnecessary, but in the meantime for
purposes of hacking slime itself it's damned handy to have an
alternate route into Lisp when things get wedged.

(There's also the problem that although we can redirect all 'normal'
lisp output, we don't currently trap anything in the lisp that
bypasses the streams layer (e.g. foreign code printing to file
descriptors) so that winds up in *inferior-lisp* as well.  I'm sure we
can solve this some other way, but thus far we haven't)


-dan

-- 

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