[slime-devel] Re: SLIME on a local socket

[Jan Rychter]

>>>>> "Helmut" == Helmut Eller <e9626484 at stud3.tuwien.ac.at>:
 Helmut> Daniel Barlow <dan at telent.net> writes:
 >> Opinions?  You can get attachtty as part of detachtty, in Debian,
 >> FreeBSD ports, or from http://www.cliki.net/detachtty

 Helmut> Are you aware that CVS Emacs has support for Unix sockets?  It
 Helmut> does server socket too.

 Helmut> I don't know why people are so keen to use a setup where the
 Helmut> Lisp and Emacs are on different machines, but whenever I tried
 Helmut> to do something like that (e.g, with remote-compile) it didn't
 Helmut> work very well and I always run Emacs on the same machine.  Is
 Helmut> this a feature we want to support or is this a
 Helmut> would-be-nice-in-an-ideal-world thing?

Many good reasons have already been listed in this thread, I'll add
another one: virtual machines. I routinely use UML (User-Mode Linux) and
VMware to run stuff. Now there is also Xen on the horizon, which is
supposed to virtualize with marginally small performance loss.

If you wonder why one would want to run a Lisp in a virtual machine,
think snapshots, versioning, copy-on-write, experiments. Plus, the day
UML or Xen gets software suspend-to-disk support, I'm moving all my life
inside it. Just imagine a permanent, suspendable, migratable
environment, where you do not have to reset your programming environment
just because your USB drivers chose to pull the machine down with them.

So, I'll pitch in: yes, there are good reasons to support a remote Lisp.

--J.