[slime-devel] GCL and slime

[Helmut Eller]

Pekka NIiranen <pekka.niiranen at wlanmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> why is GCL (http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl/) not supported?

Short answer: because nobody wrote a backend for it.

Long answer: it would be fairly difficult. GCL is still missing some
ANSI features (e.g. readtable-case) which make it hard to compile the
portable bits of SLIME.  Then you also need various extensions like
socket support, user extensible streams (e.g. Gray streams), a
debugger interface, source locations for compiler messages, and source
location recording (for find-definition). 

So you have to enhance GCL in various ways to make it usable with
SLIME.  It is more work for GCL than for the Lisps that we support
now, because the others have been used with IDEs before and most of
the required features are already available.

At at minimum you need (server) sockets and some debugger support.
User extensible streams are needed, if you want to use the Emacs based
REPL.

Below is a start of gcl backend.  It implements the socket stuff and
and some debugger bits. It used to work, with a few #-gcl in some
other files.  It isn't very comfortable because the REPL is missing.
I don't use GCL and wasn't motivated to implement the (rather more
difficult) rest.

Helmut.

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