* Elliott Slaughter [2009-12-07 10:30+0100] writes:
Hi,
I'd like to interact with a running lisp process while it's executing a long-running function. Currently, any requests I make during the long running function call get pipelined until after the function call ends. As a contrived example, execute (sleep 10) at the REPL, then try to compile (C-c C-c) a function in another source file while Lisp is busy sleeping.
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.
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.
Helmut