The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

Just a quick note about something I recently found whilst trying not to buy MOCL… http://www.lambdanative.org/ LambdaNative is developed and maintained by the Pediatric Anethesia Research Team (PART) and the Electical and Computer Engineering in Medicine (ECEM) group at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I have spent a week or two evaluating it and accidentally contributed a pull request that got merged and one that didn’t and I have to say that, for what it offers, it is awesomely good. Having personally spent many hours with it now, I do not yet think it is ready for mainstream development for a few reasons. I don’t mean that it a bad way either. What I mean is that the language, Scheme, is not really that widely known and as such it probably won’t break out into the public arena any time yet. That’s a real shame because I think that they have achieved an amazing thing; total abstraction of the underlying platform with a really powerful, underestimated language. ...

After encountering an issue with socket handling in the remote REPL server code I needed to build guile from source but it just wouldn’t. I downloaded a mint latest source from http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/ and gave it this spell: ./configure --prefix=/opt/local to make it overwrite the Mac Porst version to see if that would fix it. It didn’t. After further close reading of the configure help text for guile the answer was there as usual, resulting in this incantation: ./configure --with-libltdl-prefix=/opt/local --prefix=/opt/local Result… clean run of the configure script! Now all I have to do is build it and get to the bottom of the problem. Apparently it only happens on OSX, Ubuntu is not affected, nor presumably is any other *nix. Oddly, geiser mode works, if that is using com-int buffers then I don’t see why I cannot then use telnet or netcat to connect to the REPL server. We’ll see! It’s got something to do with opening a socket in non-blocking mode then sen...