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

[Bill Clementson]

bmastenb at cs.indiana.edu wrote:

> On Nov 27, 2003, at 1:31 AM,
Bill_Clementson at peoplesoft.com wrote:
>> 2. Effort is put into creating more complete LEP
implementations for
>> different CL's so that ELI can be used effectively
on multiple CL
>> implementations. The benefit of this option is that
ELI is very
>> full-featured as it is and just the port of the
underlying 
>> communication
>> layer would need to be done. Also, since the
largest commercial CL 
>> vendor
>> supports ELI and actively enhances it, we can take
advantage of both
>> commercial and open source development efforts.

> As far as I understand it, LEP won't work on
non-threaded lisps, which 
> means there will always be room for a solution that
doesn't require 
> threading. Of course taking advantage of it where
present is great, but 
> right now SBCL lacks threads on anything but x86. 

I may be wrong, but my understanding was that:

1. ELI uses a socket for communicating between Emacs
and CL. 
2. The CL implementation, on getting a message on the
socket, launches a thread to service the request. This
allows multiple request to be submitted to the
underlying CL implementation. 

On a non-threaded lisp, this (of course) would not be
possible since the CL implementation couldn't spawn
off multiple threads. Instead, it would block until
able to complete the request and return the result to
Emacs. This would be equivalent to what happens under
comint mode (and, presumably, SLIME). However, if my
understanding of how LEP functions is correct, this
wouldn't mean that you couldn't port ELI to a
non-threaded CL, just that you wouldn't realize the
benefits of threads.

> If you want to help 
> out, I'm sure that we'd take any code patches
towards getting gencgc 
> working on PowerPC - it's not a trivial matter
though, 

My development environment is MS Windows.

> and in the 
> meantime I enjoy having a development environment
that works on SBCL/OS 
> X.

Sure. I enjoy having a development environment too.

--
Bill Clementson

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