[ESS] Swankr

[Vitalie Spinu]

> This looks like an error that I fixed yesterday evening -- are you using
> the most up-to-date git checkout?  Sorry, I should have said that you'd
> probably need to pull.  (If you are using the most up-to-date checkout,
> then there's clearly some more debugging to be done)
>

I am using  http://common-lisp.net/r/users/crhodes/swankr.git to clone
into, but the last log is from April the  6th.

git log --max-count=1
commit f678cda036f08d67af61eebaade8614478f7771e
Author: Christophe Rhodes <csr21 at cantab.net>
Date:   Wed Apr 6 09:14:46 2011 +0100

    update BUGS and TODO


The git:// link is incorrect
git://common-lisp.net/crhodes/swankr/swankr.git, it should be
git://common-lisp.net/users/crhodes/swankr.git
and it clones as expected.

I see the prompt and 1+1 works. In case of an error though I am
getting a backtrace of depth 29 with a lot of stuff coming from swankr
itself. This renders the backtrace a bit useless.

I can also reproduce the lattice plot directly in the repl, nice. But
base plots are not working at all:( What are other things to try? You
said the debugging interface is almost ready. Can I already do some
visual debugging like jumping through lines of code?

I can see how all this stuff will pay back in the long run, but for
the time being it's a huge paradigm shift. Integrating swankr into ESS
would mean shipping slime with ESS, with an advantage of virtually
seamless transition from users' perspective, and disadvantage of
requiring a huge investment from ESS team to refactor the existing
interface and learn the internals of swankr and slime.  If a
stand-alone R-mode to be developed, that would mean a split in user
base, and obviously users will have to learn slime interface. Moreover
developers of external addons will have to decide what interface to
support and thus a split in developer base - always a bad thing. Also
I am not sure how welcome R is for slime developers. Presumably the
nature of R will require some specific tailoring in the slime itself,
which means some sort of cooperation will be required.


Best,
Vitalie.