[slime-devel] The 1.0-alpha plan

[Brian Downing]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 09:07:08AM +0200, Helmut Eller wrote:
> I'm tempted to remove the :sigio support for SBCL because it seems to
> cause problems for most people.  Objections?

Could it just be made non-default if there's no threading?  I like
:sigio (it usually works for me for whatever reason), since on my Mac
it's the only way to get any Slime interactivity while a long
computation is running.

Also, there appears to be some sort of issue with :spawn and SBCL that
slows down compilation considerably.  Luke saw this on #lisp earlier
today.  On my Intel box, 3.0GHz, with SBCL 0.8.12 :sb-thread :sb-futex,
and Linux 2.6.6, compiling McCLIM (with the ASDF system, executed from
the Slime REPL) resulted in increasing pauses during the compile.  Big
pauses - 1-2 seconds, which is an eternity on that machine.  There were
multiple SBCL threads taking up a lot of CPU time.  Emacs was not taking
that much, so it wasn't just fontification.  Running the same compile
from the standard command line REPL was many times faster with no
pauses.

It'd be good if issues like these could be identified before release
(either as a Slime problem to be fixed or an SBCL problem to notify the
SBCL developers), because a threaded SBCL and :spawn communication-style
is definitely going to be the default for the long run.

-bcd