[Gardeners] Slim-vim (nee Slimpl) project status, April 2006

[Larry Clapp]

On 2006-04-03, Pascal Bourguignon <pjb at informatimago.com> wrote:
> Larry Clapp writes:
>> In the coming months, we want to take slime.el and get it to run in
>> ECL in Vim.  Ideally, we won't have to alter slime.el very much,
>> but I suspect that that dream won't come true; slime.el has a lot
>> of Emacs-specific code wrapped up in it (oddly enough ;).  
>
> No, no.  There's already swank client written in Common Lisp, in
> clim-desktop.  http://www.cl-user.net/asp/libs/clim-desktop
> Extract and use it in ecl!

Weeell, I think saying "a Swank client in CL" overstates the case a
bit.  Swine calls Swank directly, not over a network.  I'll look at
Swine to supplant my little ecl-repl module, and that would make a
"real" Swank client mostly unneeded, I'll grant you -- as long as you
don't mind that your Lisp program must run locally, and that a bug in
it can also crash your editor, instead of just an external Lisp
process.  (On the other hand, if we can get ECL threads working with
Vim, then that probably wouldn't be a problem.)

It makes for an interesting discussion of point of view: would you
call Vim+ECL "an editor linked to CL", or "CL with an editor linked to
it"?  :)  Given that -- at present -- the editor's flow of control
dominates the Lisp's, the answer looks pretty clear to me -- at
present.  But maybe not in the future.

Thanks for the tip, though!

-- Larry