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

[Bill Clementson]

>> 3. Flesh out SLIME with the functionality that is
available today in ILISP
>> and ELI. This is the "clean slate" option. It would
allow for a new Emacs
>> CL mode to be developed utilizing the best ideas
from ILISP & ELI. It also
>> requires the greatest amount of effort.

>s/effort/fun/ :-)

Yes, that's a valid reason. However, if I do a wc of
the elisp files in the different packages, I get the
following results (lines/words/chars):

SLIME: 4345/14463/161611
ILISP: 15466/63798/565273
ELI: 19801/77244/743786

According to these figures, you've still got a lot of
fun ahead of you to get feature parity with ILISP/ELI
:-)

>This is firmly the path we've taken, except that
we're primarily
>stealing ideas from Emacs Lisp's development
environment.

And some of the stuff that I've seen come out of SLIME
looks pretty neat. So far, I've only been able to
drool over screen shots as I primarily use MS Windows.

>> 4. Integrate SLIME and ILISP. This would add
multiprocessing support to
>> ILISP and would allow SLIME to take advantage of
the rich functionality
>> already built into ILISP.

>As Dan mentioned, we don't do any multiprocessing
yet, though we hope
>our infrastructure will permit it with minimal
rewriting.

>If you guys are interested in using TCP for your
connection, the
>socket code is pretty easy. I don't think merging
with SLIME would be
>a practical way to do it though.

I'm not advocating adding TCP socket code to ILISP or
merging ILISP and SLIME. I just consider that another
option. As I said, it could be a "win-win option" but
it might also be a "Frankenstein". Since ILISP was
built on top of comint mode, it would probably be too
much effort to retrofit socket communication support
as an alternative. 

In any case, good luck with SLIME. I look forward to
seeing what further developments you make in improving
Emacs<->CL development environments. 

Cheers,
Bill

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