Re: Pipes between lisp and C

[Liz Allen <liz.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay>]

An alternative to using pipes is to use IPC (inter-process
communication).  A while back, we developed a large system here that
had 4 seperate processes which (in our first attempt) had started up
one another using the process function and had communicated via
pipes.  However, when we were trying to debug it, we found it nearly
impossible to communicate with the subprocesses when they error'd out.
These were written in lisp so we wanted to do (showstack)'s, etc. to
find out where the bugs were occurring.  Later, when IPC came out, we
switched over to it, and the debugging became much simpler since we
could run the processes independently on seperate terminals and debug
each without having to interrupt the others explicitly.  I don't know
what the best way for you to get hold of IPC is.  We had some lisp
functions defined for doing IPC port open, close, read, etc, but we
haven't used them for a long time.  I believe that CMU has also used
IPC with lisp and has exported a set of Franz Lisp IPC functions.  You
might want to contact them for more information.

				-Liz