[slimpl] Update on vim internals and ECL

[Larry Clapp]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 01:36:06AM +0000, Jim Bailey wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Mar 2006 16:10:05 -0500 Larry Clapp wrote:
> > With ECL available for Vim, I'm leaning towards abandoning the
> > SLIMPL Perl module and doing one in straight CL.
> 
> If that suits you better, great! The down side of requiring a patch
> isn't quite the problem I thought it was : given my frankly cold
> reception on the gvim-dev mailing list it looks like getting async
> events into VIM proper might take a while (but to be fair it is the
> weekend and they are trying to get 7.0 out the door). So it looks
> like patches will be required for a while yet anyway, and what is a
> patch and a make to a CL fan?

It's good practice for a Gardener's project.  (That's my story and I'm
sticking to it.  ;)  By which I mean, we Gardeners will no doubt run
up against other projects that might like to accept our patches, but
just can't, right at the moment, so we a) will have to keep our patch
in sync with their cvs, and b) can spend that time polishing and
extending the functionality of the patch.

In this case, we can document the :ecl interface and write a help file
for it, write examples, compile Vim for various systems (Linux,
Windows, Mac), and so on.  

> I have added async capabilities to VIM for unix terminals and gtk,
> the win32 and motif code is ripe for copying from the netbeans code
> but I can't test it so have left it out for the moment. I have also
> added ecl bindings so ecl can register on-data-ready callbacks with
> its tcp sockets. This should be useable platform to start from.

Coooool.  GTK or GTK2?  I use configure option "--enable-gui=gtk2".

> > Thanks again for this work!  How long did it take you?  What did
> > you use as your model?
> 
> You are welcome, anything to further the fine cause of allowing me
> developing CL code from vim. 2 days. I have embedded ECL a few times
> before, and the same for Python, so translating was quite simple for
> me - I guess I was the right tool for the job. Thanks to ECL for
> being so darn easy to embed, and thanks to the authors of if_python
> for providing an easy to understand example/template.

Thanks for the summary.

Speaking of Python, thanks to them again -- I also used the Python
section of "configure.in" to back-port your ECL patch into autoconfig.
I don't know anything, really, about autoconfigure, but using the
Python section as a template (and ECL's friendlyness) made it easy to
put ECL into configure.in.

If I'd looked at if_python for a model instead of if_perl, maybe I
wouldn't've thought adding ECL to Vim would take so much effort.  Or
maybe you just made it look easy.  :)

> Unfortunately its going to take me a while to get my async patches,
> ECL patches, and combined patches together, and I am busy for the
> next 36 hours, but I will try and release them soon.

Well, I'm hardly in a position to fuss at people when they have real
work to do  :)  so take your time.

-- Larry