Re: Question: LispWorks IDE with different CL engine?

That's kind of my point.  In the LW IDE you can just point at somewhere in a definition and say 'stop here' and it will show you little indicators where the breakpoints are, and reinstall them when you recompile the definition etc.  And you can point the inspector at values for things from a break loop and that will talk to the class browser and ...  And may be SBCL can stop at fairly fine-grained points like that, and may be you could train the LW IDE to display and track them like it does for LW and may be you could have some inspect-over-the-wire protocol
to do the inspector stuff and so on.  But whatever that is it's going to be a lot of hard work.

And again: may be I am weird but once I've got my program running in LW it almost always will run in SBCL (the SBCL compiler is fussier, sometimes in ways I'd like the LW compiler to be, sometimes not).  The compiler notes from SBCL are often useful (but if I never see the 'consing one double for the return value of this function which is going to run a hundred billion iterations of something over several enormous arrays with no float consing and I am sure you very much want to know about that 16 bytes of consing don't you?  what do you mean 'no'? how dare you? I know best' message again I will be happy).

--ti 

> On 2 Feb 2026, at 18:57, Paul Werkowski (as pw at snoopy dot qozzy dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>  Having spent a few months with cmucl + emacs + slime, I came to conclusion that the LW IDE was well worth the price of admission. Debugging was almost impossible. Setting a breakpoint meant manually inserting (break) and then trying to find the working emacs buffer again.
> Or maybe I just did not know how to use slime.
> 
> On 2/2/2026 1:47 PM, Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com) wrote:
>> The question is not whether you can persuade the LW IDE to talk to SBCL but what use is that, and is is worth the candle?
>> 
>> If you're using the LW IDE you have a high-quality, deeply integrated CL right there, in the same Lisp image as the IDE.  That gives you most of the things people liked about LispMs: the LW IDE is, by margin, the closest thing to using a LispM I know of (it's not very like a LispM in interface but the all-in-one-image thing is a big deal).  Getting an implementation that is sitting at the end of a bit of string to be anything like that nice is going to be ... well, good luck with it
>> 
>> I think we need to know what OP wants to achieve.
>