[slime-devel] OpenMCL Stuff and Swank Compilation

[James Bielman]

Greetings,

I've about finished merging my latest OpenMCL code with Slime CVS.
However, the code that compiles the sys-dependent backend in an
EVAL-WHEN in swank.lisp does not work in OpenMCL.  (As I understand
the problem, all the DEFMACROs and DEFVARs would need to have
EVAL-WHENs around them as well...)

Following Dan's suggestion in IRC I started on a loader that the Emacs
Lisp calls to compile and load the backend---I've put it up at
http://jamesjb.com/slime/swank-loader.lisp for comments.

One thing we lose if we do it this way is the ability to give the user
the nice "recompile swank?" prompt---we could instead have the elisp
compile each of the backend files but then we cannot automagically
figure the right backend based on *FEATURES*.

(I tried to test the loader under MacOS X SBCL but Swank doesn't seem
to run in my build of 0.8.4., thus only tested in OpenMCL).

Speaking of testing, a few trivial runs of the unit tests with the
OpenMCL backend resulted in 255 failures---after glancing at the code
it looks like it would need a fair bit of work to port.  

In particular it doesn't seem to deal very well with unimplemented
slimefuns---perhaps we need a better way to say 'this function is
unimplemented' besides dumping the user into the debugger?

James

-- 
#:jamesjb