Re: SLIME

--- Luke Gorrie <[email protected]> wrote:
> Bill Clementson <[email protected]> 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.

I can't speak for ILISP; however, I don't think the
maintainers have ever been unsympathetic to
incorporating innovations into the code base. ILISP
does need to work with a wide variety of CL and Scheme
implementations though so implementation-specific
enhancements can't break functionality for other
implementations.  

> > 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.
> (*)

Maybe. Part of the reason that open source efforts
don't succeed more often is that there is so much
divergent development going on. (see Olin Shivers
article about 100% and 80% solutions:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/~shivers/sre.txt). Sometimes
that's a "good thing", sometimes not. It would be nice
to have a more robust, multi-threaded Emacs
development environment for CL. The chances of such an
effort succeeding is probably greater if there are
multiple bodies willing to spend time on it. Will both
ELI-SBCL and SLIME succeed if their goals are the
same? Maybe. 

Cheers,
Bill

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