It used to be possible to run multiprocessing servers like a webserver which coexisted with slime. This is no longer possible With current CVS slime, swank's WAIT-FOR-EVENT blocks all other processes from handling FD events
There is a simple test case, but here is a more realistic one: I'm attaching a program "t2.lisp" which seeks to illustrates the problem. This is a simple program which listens on a port [8128 by default] and prints a message to clients which connect to it.
-- In a bare lisp
* (load "t2.lisp")
LISTEN-FOR-CONNECTIONS creates a process which listens at port 8128.
-- run `telnet localhost 8128' from a shell, a few times.
This will result in the bogus service printing a message to the telnet client, as expected.
-- load slime in the lisp, and listen at port 4005
* (load "/path/to/swank-loader.lisp") * (swank-loader::init) * (swank::setup-server 4005 #'print nil nil (swank::find-external-format "latin-1-unix"))
-- Connect to the lisp from emacs using M-x slime-connect localhost 4005
-- run `telnet localhost 8128' from a shell.
This hangs until the slime connection exits.
This is a serious problem, and exposes many issues with SLIME's design. -- Madhu