Re: Status of the "Project Ideas" page / Summer of Code

[Neil Jerram]

"Martin Kuehl" <address@hidden> writes:

> And if it works smoothly, a module browser could be implemented on top of it.
> And the way to extend the load-path could be generalized to
> inspect/adapt guile's runtime options.

Yes, those would both be nice features too.

> With "timeout for help-echo evaluations", do you mean that the window
> popping up when I, say, `gds-eval-defun' a defun?

No; the scenario here is when displaying an error stack or stopped at
a breakpoint, so Emacs is displaying the stack in one window and the
source for the selected stack frame in the other window.  In this
state, if you hover the mouse over a variable (or in fact any
identifier) in the highlighted source code, GDS will send a request to
the Guile process to get the value of that variable, and then display
the value in a help-echo (aka tooltip).

Currently the tooltip display routine calls accept-process-output
synchronously until the value comes back from the Guile process, so
GDS will be deadlocked if something goes wrong and prevents the value
from coming back.  Therefore the idea of this task is to impose a
timeout on this.

> The ones that immediately spark my interest are the repl buffer,
> module browser and continuation bookmarking.  Of these, I think I'd
> find the module browser the most useful, but that's because 1) I don't
> think a repl buffer is needed when your "other" buffers are
> interactive enough (think lisp-interaction-mode for scheme buffers
> with gds underneath) and 2) I have absolutely no idea how a usable
> interface for debugging with continuation bookmarks might feel like. I
> doubt a simple "step forward/backward" ui would capture their style
> very well, and I also doubt that the ui for Emacs's own named
> bookmarks would suit any kind of debugging session.
> This task does sound really fancy though :-)
>
> I'm just now remembering buddha[1], a "declarative debugger" for
> Haskell.  An oracle-style interface like that might suit cont.bkm.,
> and the capability to substitute expressions on the fly would be a
> great improvement.

I just took a quick look at [1] (just the "What is buddha?") and I'm
afraid I can't immediately see the connections.  Can you explain a bit
further what you have in mind?

Regards,
        Neil