chex

chex lets you run a REPL in a separate Lisp instance and fully communicate with it over streams.

It uses uiop:launch-program to asynchronously launch a program and get its i/o over streams.

Installation

chex is available on Ultralisp.

Assuming you have added Ultralisp to your quicklisp, just run

(ql:quickload :chex)

You may need to run (ql:update-dist "ultralisp") to get the latest version of chex.

or if Ultralisp is down you can use quicklisp's local-projects mechanism:

cd ~/quicklisp/local-projects
git clone https://github.com/oliverdelancey/chex.git

Compatibility

chex has been tested with SBCL, CCL, and ABCL, and should be either implementation-independent or trivially easy to add compatibility. Hit up Issues if there's an implementation that's not working.

chex has been tested on Windows 11 and Linux (Fedora Workstation), so it should also work on Windows 10 and other Linux distributions.

Documentation

All functions/methods/classes have docstrings, so describe is your friend.

Usage

See start.lisp for an example.

Start a repl:

(defparameter *repl* 
  (chex:start-repl 
    "sbcl" 
    (asdf:system-relative-pathname "chex" "child/chex-init.lisp")))

chex-init.lisp redirects relevant streams in the child process to allow reading/writing to all standard streams through *standard-output* and *standard-input*. It also adds :chex-child to *features*.

It is provided as an option so you can supply your own file if needed, to do whatever setup you need in the child process.

Read the repl's output:

(chex:read-strings-from-repl *repl*)

This will return 2 values: the output of IO-STREAM, the main i/o stream, and the output of ERROR-STREAM, the error output stream.

Send a string to the repl:

(chex:send-string-to-repl str *repl*)

This should input to any input stream in the child process, including the interactive debugger (*debug-io*) and queries (*query-io*), as long as they have been properly redirected with chex-init.lisp.

Close the repl:

(chex:close-repl *repl*)

This should close the process and all related streams. Returns T if the close was successful, NIL otherwise.