[slime-devel] Re: SLIME with AllegroCL on Windows - dumb question

[Luke Gorrie]

Peter Seibel <peter at gigamonkeys.com> writes:

> Not having a Windows box to play with, I haven't gotten around to
> trying SLIME on Windows. What's the reason it doesn't Just Work? Is it
> Allegro specific?

I don't have Windows either and have generally been happy that people
have looked after themselves in this respect :-)

I think it's mostly simple. Here is what SLIME wants to do:

  1. Open a lisp in *inferior-lisp*
  2. Send Lisp forms directly to the REPL asking it to load/start Swank
  3. Poll a /tmp file until swank writes its port number there
  4. Read the port number and connect

but some Windows Lisps are GUI beasts and don't want to run under
*inferior-lisp* so they won't work this way.

So instead one has to do something like Edi did:

  1. Start Lisp as a GUI program with an argument telling it to start Swank
  2. Loop doing `slime-connect' on a well-known-port until we manage
     to connect to the asynchronously-starting server.

and this could perhaps be rolled into SLIME proper as an alternative
startup flow and tested/used on Unix.

This is probably not the full story though. There has been VBscript
flying around and I haven't understood what it's upto.

-Luke