[slime-devel] Installing SBCL - W32 - SLIME - Emacs - Spawning child process: invalid argument

[St/n_P/rm/n]

Installing SBCL - Emacs - W32 - SLIME | Error - Spawning child
process: invalid argument

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I am posting this in hopes that it might prevent some headaches for others.
There don't appear to be many recent discussions of sbcl, slime, emacs
on Windows systems and I broke my head on this one for awhile.

I was getting the following error when starting Slime: "Spawning child
process: invalid argument"

Problem was probably in two places:

1) Recent install of the sourceforge Windows Binary of SBCL 1.0.13 had
not propagated the environmental variables PATH and SBCL_HOME prior to
a system restart

2) I was passing the WRONG string in the .emacs:

(setq inferior-lisp-program "C:/Program Files/Steel Bank Common
Lisp/1.0.13/sbcl.exe")

Slime wasn't looking for the path to the sbcl executable.

After a restart the system could initialize SBCL from a command prompt
i.e. the system variable was now properly set and Slime was able to
connect to the inferior lisp by calling "sbcl" from inside emacs with
<M-x Slime>

The necessary invocation required in the .emacs is contrary to the
instructions in the "Slime User Manual v 1.2 circa April 2005" which
suggest providing the path to the lisp system - the following was what
I SHOULD have had
in the .emacs :

(setq inferior-lisp-program "sbcl")

I am not sure how this affects other lisps or if it is unique to my system.

However, with that change in place, I am happy to report that slime
will connect with sblc just fine using the following setup:

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GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2008-05-12 on LENNART-69DE564 (patched)

Emacsw32 patched from available:
http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/DL/EmacsW32/EmacsCVS/ptch/Emacs-23-CvsP080512-EmacsW32-1.58.exe

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A recent April 2008 cvs pull of Slime

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous at common-lisp.net:/project/slime/cvsroot
co slime

or, a recent cvs snapshot tarball
http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/root.tar.gz?root=slime&view=tar

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SBCL 1.0.13 from:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sbcl/sbcl-1.0.13-x86-windows-binary.msi

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With slime installed in w32's default site-list directory the
following are the relevant portions of the .emacs :

(add-to-list 'load-path "C:/Program Files/Emacs/site-lisp/slime")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

(require 'slime-autoloads)
(add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook (lambda () (slime-mode t)))
(add-hook 'inferior-lisp-mode-hook (lambda () (inferior-slime-mode t)))
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