[Openmcl-devel] hemlock and multiple servers

[Gary Byers]

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004, alex crain wrote:

> Hemlock has support for multiple lisp environments, which offers three
> exciting possibilities:
>
> 1) support for running the IDE on a local workstation and the lisp
> environment on specialized
> lisp hardware, or maybe a cluster environment.
>
> 2) editing code in a development environment that is not polluted by
> the editor and any
> other development tools.
>
> 3) OpenMCL as a front end for some other lisp.
>
> #1 seems like a stretch, #2 is of questionable value and #3 definately
> falls into the "Why would
> you actually want to do this" category.
>
> Does anyone in the group think that they would actually use this
> feature? It doesn't actually
> work at the moment and it's really  a question of whether to keep the
> hooks in or not. It's
> an interesting idea and might be useful as a strategy for creating
> deliverable applications
> but there are other ways and IMHO, editing simultaneously in two lisp
> environments
> would be a potentially confusing. I don't have really strong feelings
> either way. Dumping
> it would be an opportunity to reduce the command set and simplify the
> system.
>
> Opinions?
>

I always thought that all of the elaborate support for server/editor
lisps running in separate processes was there because CMUCL didn't
have threads (certainly not when Hemlock was first written) and they
thought that this was easier/cleaner than other approaches to
embedding an editor in a single-threaded environment would have been.

The only reason I can think of for not eliminating it completely is
to make eventual merging with the main Hemlock tree easier.