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

[Luke Gorrie]

Bill Clementson <bill_clementson at yahoo.com> writes:

> Even if the eventual goal is to replace all the functionality that
> is provided by ILM/ILISP, ILISP would provide more "short-term"
> benefits for the SLIME CL developer than ILM would.

That would have been one way, but we went the clean-room approach. We
only use ILM to start Lisp and compile our server, and *inferior-lisp*
as a debugging fallback. We've covered all the major features now,
although there's plenty of hacking left to do to get all the details
right and support everyone's favourite add-ons.

Starting from scratch means more work/fun, but it also gives us a
fresh codebase. To an outsider, some of the code in ILISP is slightly
terrifying :-), as in any program with such a long history. We also
wanted to do most things differently and to have an environment more
like the elisp one, so it would only give us a head-start in the
short-term.

ELI really doesn't appeal to my hackstincts. From the web I can't even
tell who wrote it, and most questions on groups.google.com seem to go
without definitive answers. I downloaded my copy from Neil van Dyke's
website, which says "Please do not pester Franz to support this
packaging, lest they regret GPL'ing."

It looks like Franz did the least necessary to be allowed to link with
Emacs under the GPL, and would be unlikely to let a dozen random
hackers into their CVS tree :-) so that is a potential dead-end.

So I think our approach is pretty reasonable. We'll see how it
goes. I'm even hoping we can tempt some of you fine hackers to have a
play around on the dark side ;-)

And of course my views do not necessarily reflect those of the other
SLIME hackers, but I hope this answers this thread's main
question. Note however that this is almost entirely after-the-fact
rationalization. Really, it was just too addictive to stop. ;-)

Cheers,
Luke