Back on the train, gang#

Fri, 16 Nov 2001 19:12:32 +0000

Back on the train, gang

The other day I had a look at db-sockets again. This is a fairly low-level interface to BSD sockets for SBCL that I started about two years ago and then never really revisited - I wrote a couple of other things layered on top of it (Araneida and CLiki) but only the bits of socket implementation than I actually needed ever happened. And nobody else (that I know of) ever used it either - probably either because they wanted something more abstract, or because they wanted something CMUCL-compatible (or indeed both).

Writing db-sockets the first time around convinced me that Unix APIs are pretty damn sucky in places. I'd mostly forgotten about this, but it's starting to come back to me now. The other thing I hadn't realised at the time, though, is just how sucky db-sockets also is. Was. Whichever. Garbage collecting objects-which-represent-file-descriptors is so horribly the wrong thing that I don't want to think about it.

New db-sockets will probably be even more low-level. It will deal in file descriptors, will use Lisp memory for the sockaddr and other structures lying around the place, will have suitable macrology for managing fds so that we don't leave them lying around open until the next time the user happens to GC, and will, we hope, be a sensible target to port net.sbcl.sockets to, so that people who want cmucl-compatible stuff can have it as well without feeling they're getting two of everything. Then I will sort out Araneida, and then I will fix CLiki. And hopefully someone will package CLX for SBCL so that - actually, I'm not sure it would be so cool for that to happen because then I'd probably start hacking on Eclipse again. And that's a time sink.

• WARNING : GConf error: Object Activation Framework error: OAF problem description: 'Nothing matched the requirements.'

Repeat x20. I love gnome error messages too

Right.