[slime-devel] swank-rpc module

[Helmut Eller]

* Terje Norderhaug [2010-01-16 03:43+0100] writes:

> I think it is time that we factorize out swank's low level rpc layer
> into a new swank-rpc module that deals with how events are encoded
> and passed between the client and server.
>
> I have enclosed a draft of a new swank-rpc module for the
> project. Almost all of the code is extracted directly from the
> swank.lisp file  of the slime-2010-01-15 distribution. It can be
> included with no  disruption to SLIME.
>
> The module act as a specification of the event passing protocol,
> facilitating alternative swank implementations such as on clojure and
> scheme. It can optionally validate the input to ensure that the
> events are consistent with the protocol.

I don't see the point of this exercise.  Obviously people have written
servers and clients whitout our help, i.e. it's not terribly hard to
figure out how Slime works.  I bet that decoding the wire syntax was one
of the easier parts.

> As the swank event passing protocol is orthogonal, Common Lisp swank
> clients like MCLIDE can share the swank-rpc module with the project
> instead of duplicating the code.

Doesn't sound very convincing.  The way you did it, the client would
need to have a swank and swank-backend packages.

Helmut