Many Free Software developers will have been aware of the SourceForge CVS outage over the weekend (from Friday to Wednesday morning). This certainly caused some frustration among SBCL developers, particularly since there were some bugfixes (for the cl:listen problem described in my last entry and some new features – notably, working sb-bsd-sockets under Windows – queued up for submission by Friday lunchtime.

So, on Wednesday morning (GMT+1), the sequence of events was roughly:

T:

SourceForge CVS back online;

T + 10 minutes:

Rudi Schlatte commits Windows contrib megapatch;

T + 20 minutes:

My new colleague, Daniel Müllensiefen, asks me for a Windows Lisp environment to start learning in.

This sequence of events meant that, rather than take the path of least resistance and simply go for the trial or personal edition of one of the proprietary Lisps (the first hit is free!), I spent a little time at Daniel's laptop (German keyboard layout, Windows in German localization... oh what fun!) getting emacs, the new and exciting SBCL, and slime talking to each other. It seems to work, at least superficially, given a patch to slime: I got the animation, the CL-USER> prompt, (* 2 3) gives 6, the debugger works. I didn't stress-test it in any way – it wasn't my laptop, after all, and besides, a newcomer to Lisp is likely to stress-test it much more than I could.

That said, experienced Lispers might be interested in some more testing of SBCL under Windows now that SLIME works. Unfortunately, they'll either have to wait for SourceForge anonymous CVS syncs to be re-enabled (probably by Friday) or use Andreas Fuchs' arch gateway.