Re: Inter-host MCL communications

[bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)]

At 23:58 11/11/92 +0036, Peter Paine wrote:
>I need to read and write data between MCL environments on seperate
>hosts.
>
>I had in mind network calls from MCL over something like TCP on
>ethernet. Ideally, I want a bidirectional stream, good bandwidth and a
>server at the receiving end.
>
>Has anyone cracked this, if so can you supply pointers please.

At  8:21 11/16/92 +0000, Ranson wrote:
>Try eval-server in the examples folder. It will allow you to EVAL expressions
>on another Mac.
>     Daniel.

Daniel is right about the eval server, but it may not be fast enough
for you.

The file "ccl:library;mactcp.lisp" provides a TCP stream. It does NOT
provide good support for one of the sides of the connection being a server.
To do this right, you really need multiple threads, which MCL doesn't
have (yet). I'm sure you can do it with polling in the existing MCL,
but that solution will not work very well if any of the requested
services takes a long time. I remember someone saying that "mactcp.lisp"
doesn't support passive opens very well, but I don't know the details.