* Helmut Eller
Yes, that would be possible
It certainly is possible: I'm was using Slime that way when I wrote the message and still am. I just didn't include patches for the Emacs side of things because what I have is unstructured and possibly disruptive, owing to my lack of familiarity with Slime internals.
and the needed changes on the Lisp seem to be small.
Changes on the CL side are very small and non-disruptive, as included in the previous post. There's only a little bit more to change on the Emacs side, because processes are slightly different from connections.
But I think unix socket support, or security in general, isn't very important for a development tool.
I understand that point of view. Note that I actually didn't propose/request/suggest security features or even unix socket support to be included in Slime, but just the slight refactoring needed for painlessly _using_ more general connection objects - created outside of Slime.
Now, more generality is always nice to have in a development tool, don't you think? ;-)
The external helper programs add some complexity
Which would be outside the scope of Slime itself.
Marcus