PORTING

PORTING CL-MUPROC

Since cl-muproc inherently relies on the multiprocessing facilities,
which are not part of the Common Lisp standard, it is impossible to
write it in a completely portable manner.  

We have taken care to access implementation-specific code via a
special interface, provided by the package CL-MUPROC.COMPAT
(cf. muproc-package.lisp).  The idea is that each implementation
supported by cl-muproc should have its own file providing an
implementation of the interface defined by CL-MUPROC.COMPAT.

At this time, cl-muproc currently supports Lispworks and OpenMCL.  We
believe that porting it to additional CL implementations should be
fairly straightforward.

The interface to implementation-specific parts of cl-muproc may need
to evolve somewhat as more implementations are added (hopefully).
However, as we do that, is important that the interface to
implementation specific code remains 'clean' in the sense that
cl-muproc interfaces in the same way to implementation-specific
functionality on all implementations; in other words: we need to keep
read-time conditionalization out of muproc.lisp, supervisor.lisp, and
friends!

If you're interested in porting cl-muproc to some platform, be sure to
join the cl-muproc-devel mailing list (available at common-lisp.net)!

Klaus Harbo
2006-06-07