[slime-devel] Re: SLIME User Survey

[Luke Gorrie]

Martin Simmons <martin at xanalys.com> writes:

> The problem might be in SWANK::ENCODE-MESSAGE.  I assume that emacs
> is on the other end of the stream, but if it fails to read fast
> enough then one of the CL stream functions in SWANK::ENCODE-MESSAGE
> might block, which will cause the error because this happens inside
> the WITHOUT-INTERRUPTS.

The intention of WITHOUT-INTERRUPTS is that we don't get a signal half
way through send a message to Emacs and then enter the debugger and
start a new message. That way we'd garble up the on-the-wire protocol.

However, this is mostly an issue for select()/SERVE-EVENT based
communications. In multithreaded (the :SPAWN communication style) it's
always the dedicated "control thread" that sends the messages, and if
that thread gets a signal and hits the debugger I think you're cactus
anyway. So WITHOUT-INTERRUPTS is probably not buying us anything.

The original poster could try hacking swank-lispworks.lisp so that
(call-without-interrupts fn) just does (funcall fn) and see if that
clears it up. Likewise with the OpenMCL backend.

-Luke