[slime-devel] Question about Slime & SBCL on Windows

[Anton Kovalenko]

"Mark H. David" <mhd at yv.org> writes:

> Thanks, I'm on Windows (both W7 and WinXP), and SBCL 1.0.51, and not
> sure what version of SLIME.  Pretty recent, I think.  Let me know if
> it matters, and give a simple way to tell.  Emacs 23.3.1.

Last update of SLIME that affected C-c C-c in threaded SBCL for Windows
happened on 1 Sep 2011; :SPAWN communication style was made the default
for any threaded SBCL with no exception for #+win32. That is, any SLIME
which deserves the name of pretty recent should already have it.

> I guess I'd like "your" SBCL to go into the unpatched, mainline SBCL.
> That's a start. What's the holdup?

Well, there's just a lot of complicated stuff, which seems like a
natural thing to expect after more than a year of development. David
Lichteblau is working now on integration of the largest piece of code
that can't be committed in pieces without breaking things (that includes
thread support, but I'm not sure of interrupts). Some of my patches that
don't depend on threading were already integrated by him before SBCL
1.0.52.

> Feel free to resend the donation URL?  :)

While we are at it, a Very Important donation page at
<http://www.siftsoft.com/support-sbcl-windows.html> now includes a "big
picture" of project history, from which you can see that threading and
interrupts are only a part of the story. On Windows, SBCL still has a
long road ahead, and I don't feel like I'd go much faster with
integration if I were in SBCL team and my patch were some other hacker's
code.

Also, as long as I merge upstream changes and test them continuously and
discuss problems in #sbcl, anything that breaks Windows build in the
mainline has a big chance to get noticed and reported at the same day
it's committed (last time it was a RUN-PROGRAM issue, when it was
refactored in the mainline to distinguish exec() failure from fork()'s).

-- 
Regards, Anton Kovalenko <http://github.com/akovalenko/sbcl-win32-threads/wiki>
+7(916)345-34-02 | Elektrostal' MO, Russia