The M-x sly command has Lisp listen on a TCP socket and wait for
Emacs to connect, which typically takes on the order of one second. If
someone else were to connect to this socket then they could use the
SLY protocol to control the Lisp process.
The listen socket is bound on the loopback interface in all Lisps that support this. This way remote hosts are unable to connect.
READ-CHAR-NO-HANG doesn't work properly for sly-input-streams. Due
to the way we request input from Emacs it's not possible to repeatedly
poll for input. To get any input you have to call READ-CHAR (or a
function which calls READ-CHAR).
The default communication style :SIGIO is reportedly unreliable with
certain libraries (like libSDL) and certain platforms (like Solaris on
Sparc). It generally works very well on x86 so it remains the default.
The latest released version of SBCL at the time of packaging should work. Older or newer SBCLs may or may not work. Do not use multithreading with unpatched 2.4 Linux kernels. There are also problems with kernel versions 2.6.5 - 2.6.10.
The (v)iew-source command can only locate exact source forms for code compiled at (debug 2) or higher. The default level is lower and SBCL itself is compiled at a lower setting. Thus only defun-granularity is available with default policies.
On Windows, SLY hangs when calling foreign functions or certain other functions. The reason for this problem is unknown.
We only support latin1 encoding. (Unicode wouldn't be hard to add.)
Interrupting Allegro with C-c C-b can be slow. This is caused by the
a relatively large process-quantum: 2 seconds by default. Allegro
responds much faster if MP:*DEFAULT-PROCESS-QUANTUM* is set to 0.1.
We require version 2.49 or higher. We also require socket support, so
you may have to start CLISP with clisp -K full.
Under Windows, interrupting (with C-c C-b) doesn't work. Emacs sends a SIGINT signal, but the signal is either ignored or CLISP exits immediately.
On Windows, CLISP may refuse to parse filenames like
"C:\DOCUME1\johndoe\LOCALS1\Temp\sly.1424" when we actually
mean C:\Documents and Settings\johndoe\Local Settings\sly.1424. As
a workaround, you could set sly-to-lisp-filename-function to some
function that returns a string that is accepted by CLISP.
Function arguments and local variables aren't displayed properly in the backtrace. Changes to CLISP's C code are needed to fix this problem. Interpreted code is usually easer to debug.
M-. (find-definition) only works if the fasl file is in the same
directory as the source file.
The arglist doesn't include the proper names only "fake symbols" like
arg1.
The ABCL support is still new and experimental.