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

[Luke Gorrie]

Bill Clementson <bill_clementson at yahoo.com> writes:

> Interesting, I wasn't aware that there was any sharing
> going on between the SLIME and ELI-SBCL efforts.

That's all Dan's doing with SB-INTROSPECT. I think he's got it exactly
right - the best way for us to all share code is for the Lisp
implementations to make supported interfaces for the functionality
that we need (e.g. finding definitions).

We should be able to do good sharing with ILISP this way too. The main
barrier for you guys, as I understand it, is that you're more
sympathetic to people who don't want to use the very latest of
everything, and won't have e.g. an SBCL with SB-INTROSPECT.

Ultimately though we should be able to share all the hairy-scary
non-portable code this way. Dan and Christophe from SBCL are leading
the charge admirably. We SLIME'ers haven't really engaged other
implementors, but do hope to work with the good folks doing CMUCL,
OpenMCL, LispWorks, and any other Lisps we end up supporting.

> Since you are obviously talking to each other and aware of what the
> other is doing, how do you see the two efforts evolving?

I for one am not big on planning the future, I've always found it
harmful in hobby-hacking. I think we'll all follow our noses, try to
write good code, and see where we end up.

As our common ancestor puts it: Don't think; hack. (*)

But at the very least we'll ask David to help us avoid fudging up our
multithreading support.

Cheers,
Luke

(*) This probably explains why loading inf-lisp hijacks all my
lisp-mode key bindings, instead of being nice and using a minor-mode.