[slimpl] some comments about vim internals

[Brad Beveridge]

On 3/2/06, Peter Seibel <peter at gigamonkeys.com> wrote:
> to debug a problem. Or, if there' a big pile of Common Lisp code that
> you don't want running in your actual server, you could have a set up
> like this:
>
>    +-------------+      +----------------+     +------------------+
>    | Editor,     |<---> | SWANK FRONTEND |<--->| Your server with |
>    | e.g. Emacs, |      | CODE written   |     | minimal SWANK    |
>    | vim, AJAX   |      | in Common Lisp |     | protocol core    |
>    +-------------+      +----------------+     +------------------+
>
> where each box is a separate process. In a normal development
> environment the two Common Lisp processes could be merged while

I like this approach.  How many people here would be onboard for this
kind of architecture?  I imagine that initially we would not try to
reduce the current swank core at all, and simply (ha!) move the useful
Slime stuff into a Swank frontend module.
Would we do something like
  - don't change Swank backend at all right for now
  - write a Swank frontend in CL that talks over a socket to the Swank core
  * should use the existing Swank portability layer for sockets and threads
  * Swank frontend should expose a nice interface that gives us easy
access to common debugger functions
  - write modules that live within the Swank frontend image and
communicate with editors, ajax, whatever.

I like Peter's idea a lot
 1) We get to write the bulk of the code in CL
 2) It is possible that the Slime guys will like the changes & keep them
 3) We can write a lot of code that is editor/usage agnostic
  4) The code that talks to an editor can be very thin, with most of
the work just being passed to the Swank frontend and getting results
back.

Thoughts?  I really liked seeing lots of posts yesterday - made me all
enthusiastic :)

Cheers
Brad