Playing nice with custom repls?

[Zach Beane]

Luís Oliveira <luismbo at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 12:34 PM, Zach Beane <xach at xach.com> wrote:
>> I like writing specialized little repls sometimes, with syntax optimized
>> for a specific task. When I'm in a repl like that, slime drops many
>> useful features, like M-., arglist display in file buffers, etc.
>>
>> Is there a way to have those features still work even when I'm in my own
>> repl?
>
> After sending a form (a string, really) for evaluation, the SLIME repl
> enters the slime-repl-read-mode which in fact disables all of those
> features. Even if those features weren't disabled they wouldn't work
> properly because, IIUC, REPL requests are serialized and processed by
> the same thread, thus the REPL would be stuck processing the event
> that triggered your custom REPL, unable to process other events.

I don't understand this part "REPL equests are serialized and processed
by the same thread" - does that mean the REPL thread is also responsible
for M-. action and arglist display in file buffers?

> One alternative would be to drop the PL part of your REPL and hook the
> RE part into swank-repl as follows:

I was really hoping to use the same code both within and without swank.

Zach