Clementson's Blog

Using SLIME/Emacs with Allegro CL on Windows

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

I recently mentioned that I tried out SLIME for working with CLISP Lisp code using Emacs. I recently also tried it with Franz's Allegro Common Lisp (ACL) on MS Windows and it worked like a charm. There are some different setup issues; however, so it is worth outlining what I did to get things working.

First of all, some background. SLIME normally uses Inferior Lisp Mode to launch the Lisp executable in Emacs and to manage the communication between SLIME and the Lisp implementation. With CLISP, this is fine since the CLISP executable is a WIN32 console application and the lisp executable needs to be a WIN32 console application in order to be launched from an Emacs inferior lisp process. However, the ACL Trial edition executables under MS Windows are WIN32 Windows applications and can not be launched from an inferior lisp in Emacs. Franz also ships a build.exe executable with their regular product (but not the trial edition). This is a WIN32 console application but there are issues with multiprocessing support with this executable and I suspect that it is really only shipped for legacy support reasons. Therefore, regardless of whether you use the ACL trial or the ACL commercial product under Windows, it is preferable to use the WIN32 Windows application version of the executable.

Therefore, instead of trying to launch ACL via Inferior Lisp Mode, I manually launch alisp.exe and start up swank (the Lisp side of the Emacs<->Lisp socket communication).

Here are the additions that I made to my .emacs file to manually launch ACL and start up SLIME by pressing the F5 key:

(global-set-key
 [(f5)]
 '(lambda ()
    (interactive)
    (shell-command "c:/bin/acl-6.2/alisp.exe +B +cm -L ~/.slime.lisp&")
    (delete-other-windows)
    (slime-connect "localhost" 4005)))

(load "c:/usr/home/site/slime/swank-loader.lisp")
(swank::create-swank-server 4005 :spawn #'swank::simple-announce-function t)