[slim-vim] How is everybody?

[Larry Clapp]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 06:58:58PM -0700, Brad Beveridge wrote:
> I've reached a point in my Slime in CL development where the
> hardness of what I am doing is greater than my motivation to do it
> :(

Bummer.

> To recap, I'm going through and pulling in code from slime.el to try
> and find a subset of slime code that will give me a connection to
> the Swank backend.  The problem with this approach is that it is not
> very incremental, you start with some likely function (say
> slime-net-connect), and as you pull in the functions to actually
> make it work the code gets larger and larger.  All without actually
> getting much feedback except function X is not implemented.
> 
> So with a sigh, I am putting this approach on the back burner.
> Anybody that feels like looking at what I have, please feel free,
> just drop me a line.

If you ever go back to it, I'd say feel free to comment stuff out, and
implement/import a bare minimum.  With my Perl module, for example, I
started off just wanting to send an expression and get a result, and
then I expanded from there (but not very far :).

I read some advice on porting code once upon a time, which said Never
Delete.  Never delete anything, just comment it out.  I've ported very
little code in my career, but when (or, sigh, if) I get around to a
full Slime port, I'll probably follow that guideline.

> I'm going to read over the swank backend code, try to get
> _something_ small working which will be more incremental to develop.
> 
> What is everbody else up to?

When I posted my State of Slim-Vim on the Gardeners list, Pascal
Bourguignon pointed me to the "Swine" code that the Clim-Desktop
project has.  It's kind of like ecl-repl, in that it interacts with
the "local" lisp (in Swine's case, the same lisp that runs the
desktop), as opposed to Slime interacting with a remote lisp over a
socket.  So I don't like it for us (though I'll keep it in mind for
extending/replacing ecl-repl), but it got me to thinking about other
ports of Slime to CL, and I found the J editor (home of Armed Bear
Common Lisp), and they have a Slime port too, and it will use the
local lisp *or* a remote lisp.  And it's only about 500 lines (5% of
slime.el), so even a complete re-write shouldn't take *too* long --
and I don't think I'd have to do a complete rewrite.

In support of that, I'm working on a network class for Vim, to put a
little abstraction around the raw socket interface that Jim wrote.  I
haven't had much non-work hacking time lately, though, so it's gone
slowly.

-- Larry