[slime-devel] Splitting slime.el

[Sean O'Rourke]

Right now slime.el is 6250 lines, which makes it one of the larger
programming modes line-count-wise.  Besides making byte-compilation
frustratingly slow, this size hides useful sub-components that (IMHO)
could be made into their own, separate modules and used outside of
Slime.  For example, once the Slime-specific evaluation code has been
factored out, there's a nice generic Elisp REPL hiding in there.  With
a bit of work today, I was able to turn it into a serviceable 500-line
tool for interactive Perl development.  While I did away with the
asynchronous I/O features for simplicity's sake, I imagine these could
be kept with a bit more work.  The Xref browser (which I've never seen
in action, not having CMUCL at hand) could be a similarly useful
component.

The long-term upside of this is that many of the Slime interfaces,
which are quite nice, could be used as a common face for other
languages that support interactive development and introspection, like
Perl, Python, and Ruby.  The downside, of course, is that this would
constrain Slime's development.  However, since Slime is stable enough
to have a manual now, this may not be such a problem.

Opinions?

/s