[slime-devel] Re: Problem with connection between sbcl and slime

[Helmut Eller]

* Kai-Florian Richter [2007-11-13 23:00+0100] writes:

> SLIME does start up, I get a lisp prompt and it seems to behave
> normally. However, the connection between SBCL and SLIME is rather
> shaky.
> At some point during working with SBCL, I lose the function parameter
> info, I also can't break running code then.

Without further context, it's hard to say what problem you are
seeing.  There are plenty of ways to screw things up :-) 
Not everything is SLIME's fault.  

If you can't interrupt running code, save the contents of the
*slime-events* buffer.  That's often useful for debugging SLIME.

> Even more, the function (quit) has no effect whatsoever, i.e. SBCL is
> not stopped, but I get a message "Evaluation aborted."
> CL-USER> (quit)
> ; Evaluation aborted.
> CL-USER> 

I think that QUIT in SBCL terminates the current thread only, unless
it is called in the initial thread.  SLIME starts a new listener
thread if the old was killed (that's sometimes nice, but sometimes
not).  The second prompt above is a bit irritating, because at that
time there is no REPL thread, a new one is created for the next
request.

> That is, I can't just quit SBCL, I have to kill the lisp process when
> exiting Emacs.

You could try sb-int:unix-exit or the REPL shortcut `, quit' which is
the same as `M-x slime-quit-lisp'.

> The PROBLEMS file states that there is trouble with kernels 2.6.5-2.6.10
> (related to multi-threading?), but I'm well beyond that kernel version;
> also, to my knowledge, I don't use multi-threading. I tried to use nohup
> in connection with sbcl (as I read that somewhere as well), but I can't
> get that to work.

For SBCL/x86 we use threads by default.  You could change that with
with swank:*communication-style*, but the alternatives are usually
worse.

Helmut.