[Chicken-users] SLIME and Chicken

[Nick Gasson]

Hi all,

I've been working on a SLIME backend for Chicken Scheme. If you haven't
used it before, SLIME is an Emacs-based development environment for
Common Lisp - http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/. The Chicken port
has gotten to the state where it's usable for development so it might
be interesting too other people too.

It currently supports the following:
 - Compile region (C-c C-c) and load file (C-c C-l)
 - Various eval commands: interactive (C-c :), region (C-c C-r), defun
   (C-M-x), pretty-print (C-c C-p)
 - The SLIME REPL
 - Simple tab completion and parameter hints (eldoc)
 - Describe symbol (C-c C-d d) and apropos (C-c C-d a) using chicken-doc
 - Very basic SLDB support - it displays the call chain on error

There's some more information in these posts:
  http://www.doof.me.uk/2010/12/12/using-slime-with-chicken-scheme/
  http://www.doof.me.uk/2011/01/01/update-to-chicken-swank-server/

If you're interested in trying it the git repository is here:
  https://github.com/nickg/swank-chicken
Setup instructions are in the README file.

Lots of SLIME features are unimplemented unfortunately, but hopefully
I've covered most of the common ones. The debugger in particular is
quite lacking. One SLIME feature I'd really like to have is M-. (jump
to definition), but I can't see a way to extract the required file/line
information from Chicken. Does anyone know if this is possible?


Thanks,

Nick