SLIME under NixOS

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:13:02 GMT

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Unfortunately, Common LISP support in NixOS is worse than one would expect (and unfortunately I do not have the time to change this) – nothing comparable to the common-lisp-controller, as far as I see. In NixOS, I do not want to install sbcl globally when I don't need it for anything else but developing my lisp projects, which is something that should be done inside a nix-shell.

As probably many lispers, I like getting my packages through QuickLisp. According to the FAQ, it is possible to install packages into other directories, so it would be possible – in theory – to have different nix-shells with a different quicklisp package directory; but then, I would probably install the same software multiple times, and the compile-cache would not work as desired. The directory structure of QuickLisp looks like it should be possible to have different branches, but I do not know of such a mechanism, and for my use case, one QuickLisp directory is sufficient. It would, though, be nice to have something like Cabal2Nix for QuickLisp.

Anyway, for my use case, I need SLIME and the CFFI, and some other packages. One of my Nix expressions, for example, is

with import <nixpkgs> {};
runCommand "bash"
{
  buildInputs = [rlwrap stdenv bash emacs php sbcl imagemagick gnome3.eog git geoip libressl lispPackages.cffi emacs24PackagesNg.markdown-mode];
} ""

The problem is that the CFFI appears not to follow the Nix environment when loading dynamic libraries. However, the variable $NIX_LISP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set automatically, and it is sufficient to append it to the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$NIX_LISP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH rlwrap sbcl

Now, through my global installation of QuickLisp, I can install swank. In the QuickLisp directory, there will be the files for SLIME. My custom emacs configuration, which I save in a file emacsconfig.el in this nix-shell's directory (where the default.nix is stored), looks like

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/slime-2.14")
(require 'slime-autoloads)
(setq inferior-lisp-program "sbcl")
(add-to-list 'slime-contribs 'slime-fancy)

Now I can run

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$NIX_LISP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH emacs -q -l emacsconfig.el

and start SLIME as usual via M-x slime.