[slime-devel] Re: Splitting slime.el

[Luke Gorrie]

"Sean O'Rourke" <seano at cs.ucsd.edu> writes:

> 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.

Yes, I like the idea of factoring out any generally useful subsystems
that are directly useful for other projects and can come out cleanly.

If you break e.g. the REPL and XRef buffer into separate files that
are stand-alone and useful for other packages, without making them
harder to use in SLIME, that would be cool.

But I don't want to split and generalize for its own sake. I find the
big slime.el comfortable, and a fair portion of the code is still
changing in major ways (esp. the evaluation mechanics / protocols).

> 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.

That's impressive :-). I wouldn't have guessed the REPL was so easily
stand-alone'ified.

Cheers,
Luke