Bill Clementson bill_clementson@yahoo.com writes:
Interesting, I wasn't aware that there was any sharing going on between the SLIME and ELI-SBCL efforts.
That's all Dan's doing with SB-INTROSPECT. I think he's got it exactly right - the best way for us to all share code is for the Lisp implementations to make supported interfaces for the functionality that we need (e.g. finding definitions).
We should be able to do good sharing with ILISP this way too. The main barrier for you guys, as I understand it, is that you're more sympathetic to people who don't want to use the very latest of everything, and won't have e.g. an SBCL with SB-INTROSPECT.
Ultimately though we should be able to share all the hairy-scary non-portable code this way. Dan and Christophe from SBCL are leading the charge admirably. We SLIME'ers haven't really engaged other implementors, but do hope to work with the good folks doing CMUCL, OpenMCL, LispWorks, and any other Lisps we end up supporting.
Since you are obviously talking to each other and aware of what the other is doing, how do you see the two efforts evolving?
I for one am not big on planning the future, I've always found it harmful in hobby-hacking. I think we'll all follow our noses, try to write good code, and see where we end up.
As our common ancestor puts it: Don't think; hack. (*)
But at the very least we'll ask David to help us avoid fudging up our multithreading support.
Cheers, Luke
(*) This probably explains why loading inf-lisp hijacks all my lisp-mode key bindings, instead of being nice and using a minor-mode.