* Elliott Slaughter [2009-12-07 10:30+0100] writes:
>
> I've been reading the manual page on swank communication style, and it sounds
> like the :spawn option does what I want. Unfortunately, thread support is not
> universal, and happens to missing on one of my main development platforms
> (SBCL on Windows). Is there any way I can work around this (e.g. add swank
> callbacks to my application)? I know this is kind of a long shot but it would
> be kind of nice to get this working independent of implementation thread
> support.

There's also :sigio which doesn't need threads but probably also not
available on Windows.

Your application could call swank::handle-requests from time to time.
The timeout argument should be 0 to poll the socket without blocking.
:fd-handler style does just that whenever SBCL performs a blocking read.
For this, read-char-no-hang should work for sockets which was broken the
last time I checked. Maybe it's fixed now.

When I try 0 as timeout, I get this error:

The assertion (OR (NOT SWANK::TIMEOUT) (EQ SWANK::TIMEOUT T)) failed.

When I use t as timeout, it does basically what I want, but I'd rather have the timeout be immediate (no wait). Is there any way to do this?

Also, it isn't entirely clear what I should pass as a connection to handle-requests. Right now I'm using (or swank::*emacs-connection* (swank::default-connection)) which seems to work fine.

Thanks for the help.

>From Emacs, entering the debgger with C-c C-b should work most of the
time (as usual, may be broken on Windows). And it should be possible to
use most commands on top of the debugger.

I think ILisp had a option to always send an interrupt before a command.
Not sure how well that would work.

There's also CCL which has a less handicapped Windows port.