[slime-devel] Re: SLIME User Survey

[Christophe Rhodes]

Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:

> Which Lisp versions do you use SLIME with?

SBCL bleeding edge.  Usually I get myself into a complete mess with
multiple fasls of old(er) versions lying around, and wondering what it
is I've done this time to cause binary incompatibility.

> Which Emacs versions?

GNU Emacs 21.3.1.  (Or, more generally, whatever's in Debian unstable
today).

> How well does SLIME work for you?

Pretty well.  It was already quite good for the limited application
programming that I do; with its improved ability to understand SBCL
syntax, all I have to do is train myself out of the habit of using X
cut'n'paste for incremental development...

> What bugs (reproducible or otherwise) or missing features annoy you?

I would like to see a little more work on coordination between slime
and implementations (not just SBCL, though obviously that's where my
focus is).  There's a load of complicated code in swank-sbcl.lisp that
I'd just love to break on the grounds that no-one asked me for
PERMISSION to use MY symbols... on the other hand, I can imagine
hordes of angry lispers turning up in London (or Cambridge, at the
weekend ;-) and lynching me if I've broken their SLIME 1.0.

One thing: emacs seems relatively bad at fontifying large buffers.
It's quite possible that this is my fault, but doing a full
compilation of CLX, McCLIM and Gsharp, say, is probably slower than it
could be because of scrolling and fontifying interaction buffers.  I'm
sure SLIME isn't designed for this kind of abuse... but maybe it could
be. :-)

> Is there some packaging system (e.g. Debian) that you would like to
> see SLIME 1.0 bundled with? If so, do you know how to coordinate this?

I can help with Debian integration, though not with the actual
distribution (though if pushed I have Debian Developers who owe me
favours :) -- I would like to encourage stable versions of SLIME to be
distributed via the package management system, because then you get
the benefits of reciprocal advocacy: sbcl's Debian package can
"Recommend: slime", for instance.

> If you said anything negative above then please say something nice
> here to make us feel good:

I'm very impressed at the way you've alleviated the need for a
cl-emacs.  It's probably not ZWEI or Zmacs (or similar mythological
Nirvana), but it seems pretty good to me.  Will buy drinks (in
addition to the ones I owe Luke!) just as soon as my paychecks start
coming through :-)

Christophe
-- 
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