Swank server startup failure

Question

Emacs SLIME can't connect to swank, because apparently swank cannot initialize correctly. It says some back end function not implemented. However, my swamp backend is SBCL, which is supported. I am using windows xp os. A similar issue was found posted at the following link, but no solution.Link to similar issue

Am I missing any configuration file for Swank? Or perhaps emacs and SBCL versions I am using have compatibility issues? In that case, where can I get the correct compatibility matrix for windows?

Answer 1

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/installing-sbcl-emacs-and-slime-on-windows-xp

Use this or any other manual, which describes how to install Emacs, sbcl and slime separately. But using the latest releases. Then it will be easier to find the problem than it is now.

Answer 2

I'm mostly using Linux, but it's very easy to run into conflicts if you have multiple versions of slime/swank code installed.

The best method is to use quicklisp and make sbcl/emacs not use any other code (at least in your first attempt):

sbcl --no-userinit --no-sysinit --load ~/quicklisp/setup.lisp 

(asdf:initialize-source-registry '(:source-registry :ignore-inherited-configuration))
(ql:quickload "quicklisp-slime-helper")
(swank:create-server :port 4545  :dont-close t :coding-system "utf-8-unix")

Then start emacs as:

emacs -q -name SLIME -eval '(progn (load (expand-file-name "~/quicklisp/slime-helper.el")) (slime-connect "localhost" 4545))'

Answer 3

This is not exactly an answer to the problem, more of an alternative.

I think some interfaces/ method definitions that Swank expects, need to be implemented by SBCL. I shifted the lisp implementation to CLisp from SBCL, and after some setup tweaking, got it to work. So, I think Swank is fine but SBCL is not.

Just for information, CLisp cannot work with short windows path, the ones that look like "Progra~1", while SBCL expects short paths. CLisp also gave some problem with the temp folder in Windows, for which a variable had to be added to the .emacs file, but after that was setup quickly.

There seem to be lots of differences between the various Lisp implementations' ports to Windows, which would not be a problem had better documentation been present. All this had to be gleaned from different blogs and mailing list.

As soon as a better answer to the original problem comes along, I'll accept that.