[slime-devel] SLIME48: a Swank back end in Scheme48

[Helmut Eller]

* Taylor Campbell [2005-09-17 05:03+0200] writes:

>    Because he wrote his own server (swank) not only the implementation
>    specific part (swank-backend).  His server also uses a rather
>    different approach to threading than we do.
>
> Can you explain why you think it will be an impediment to maintenance
> that I wrote an entire Swank server versus just a Common Lisp Swank
> back end?  I think it might actually be easier to maintain this,
> because there is a single approach to everything in SLIME48, whereas
> the Common Lisp implementation of Swank has to deal with four
> different communication styles, threads versus non-threads, and
> compatibility in swank.lisp with all of the N different CL back ends.
> But I'd like to hear why you think this is not the case.

It's clearly more work to maintain a Scheme Swank server than not to.
With the Scheme server, if we change the protocol, we have to change it
in two servers.  There is also quite a bit of code for completion,
apropos, the REPL, etc. which can be written reasonably well in ANSI
CL without implementation specific hooks.  For Scheme it has to be
maintained a second time.