[slime-devel] Slime + mit-scheme + MacOS

[Helmut Eller]

* Nunez Steve [2009-03-31 03:39+0200] writes:

> G'Day All,
>
> Does anyone here know of any pointers to getting Slime working with MIT
> scheme on the Mac? I've followed most all of the instructions in?
> swank-mit-scheme.scm, however have run into a few issues and suggestions for
> improvements:
>
>  1. The author states 'You also need the `netcat' program to create sockets.
>     ?MIT Scheme?has some socket functions built-in, but I couldn't figure out
>     how?to access the locat port number of a server socket. ?We shell out?to
>     netcat to get us started.' Fine, but he doesn't state which version of
>     netcat is required. The version on Mac OS, and on many other systems is
>     named 'nc'. Other versions, such as the GNU NetCat, don't have a '-q'
>     option.

Yes, the Mac version has different options.  ISTR that somebody reported
that and he just left -q away.  The intention of the -q option is that
nc closes the socket after a EOF instead of waiting for a few seconds.
The Mac version probably always closes the socket immediately.  That
only matters if you disconnect/reconnect frequently, e.g. for hacking on
the swank backend.

>  2. Even after trying various combinations of 'nc', 'netcat' and
>     experimenting with various netcat options, the system hangs at: '
>
>         1 ]=>?
>         ;Loading "format.com"... done
>         ;Loading "load.scm"...?
>         ; ?Loading "sos-unx.pkd"... done
>         ; ?Loading "slot.com"... done
>         ; ?Loading "class.com"... done
>         ; ?Loading "instance.com"... done
>         ; ?Loading "method.com"... done
>         ; ?Loading "printer.com"... done
>         ; ?Loading "macros.com"... done
>         ;... done
>         ;Loading "/Development/Applications/slime/contrib/
>         swank-mit-scheme.scm"... done
>
>     Both within emacs and from the command line.

You should at least see "Listening on port: 49053" somewhere.

For some more debugging output you could uncomment the body
of the log-event function in swank-mit-scheme.scm.

If you want to use the REPL you need to add something like 
(define (swank:create-repl env . _)
  (list "(user)" "(user)"))

> I'm not an emacs beginner, but am to scheme. Does anyone have any helpful
> cheat-sheets on getting this working? Or, is this a case of slime/swank
> development moving ahead without anyone (else) using it on mit-scheme? I
> notice that the MIT course 6.001 now uses PLT Scheme and it's IDE, so I
> imagine the number of users of this combination has gone down significantly.

The number must be very close to zero but certainly smaller than the
number of Edwin users (which is probably only a handful).

Helmut.