[slime-devel] Re: Clicky things in the REPL.

[Luke Gorrie]

Brian Downing <bdowning at lavos.net> writes:

> One question I would have is, how is the object accessed once it's
> clicked on?  I imagine CLIM just holds a (weak?) pointer to the object
> in its presentation.  From emacs, you may see "#<FOO {40541D01}>", and
> even know the address more concretely if its passed in some sort of
> object-info, but as soon as GC happens, you're likely screwed.

If CLIM used weak references, it would have the same trouble. I would
guess they use normal references and normal GC, but I don't know.

In Emacs it seems we get into distributed garbage collection, though
probably a simple case if only Emacs can refer to Lisp and not
vice-versa.

I guess Emacs would want to tag the textual representations of objects
with a "type" property and an "object-reference" property. Text
properties would do this nicely -- you could copy&paste objects while
preserving the references. But then to find the "live set" of
object-references in Emacs you would probably have to scan all
buffers. Overlays could be simpler, since they are properties of a
buffer region rather than text, and don't get copy&pasted or otherwise
duplicated.

BUT,

How about integrating SLIME with McCLIM instead? For example, it would
be nice to type "Edit Definition foo" in the McCLIM listener, and have
an Emacs window pop up with the definition.

McCLIM is one of the coolest things happening. It would be great to
join forces with them where possible.

Cheers,
Luke