[slime-devel] what does SWANK compile??

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ "Alex Mizrahi" <killerstorm at newmail.ru>:

| so this is weird.. does anyone have an idea what does it compile and why?

Slime starts the background lisp and then feeds it a progn form to load
swank-loader.lisp, which in turn causes the whole swank package to be
compiled, and then to run swank:start-server with suitable arguments.

As to why, well, slime is the front end and swank is the back end, and
the two need to talk the proper protocol.  Swank is compiled for
efficiency reasons.

| i would also appreciate any tips on investigating this.

I suppose the same way you study any problem with loading and
compiling lisp code.  Start with swank-loader.lisp, note where the
problem arises and use the debugger and whatever tools are handy to
find the location of the error.

- Harald