[slimpl] some comments about vim internals

[Jim Bailey]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2006 09:38:26 -0800
"Brad Beveridge" <brad.beveridge at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
<snip>
> 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

Yes, absolutely, doing as much as possible in CL seems very right, and with things like indentation in the SWANK frontend you could have emacs users and vim users working on the same files without mucking up each other's editor's automatic reindentation.

Keeping the emacs/vim/AJAX/just about anything that can be programmed part as thin as possible will only help the frontend/backend be more useful to third parties and strange unforeseen uses.

And as well as being able to move the frontend into the server for easier normal development, it could also move equally easily into any common lisp enabled editor - such as J with its ABCL, and any other JVM editor that could encorporate ABCL, and hemlock, and VIM (I'll post a preliminary ECL patch in a while)...

The only problem is that slimpl is such an excellent name, but the larger frontend unit would need its own.

Jim