November 17, 2003
net-nittin-irc

net-nttin-irc by Erik Enge is an IRC client library.

The features listed are

  • implements all commands in the RFCs
  • extra convenience commands such as op/deop, ban, ignore, etc.
  • partial DCC SEND/CHAT support
  • event driven model with hooks makes interfacing easy
  • the user can keep multiple connections
  • all CTCP commands
Posted by jjwiseman at November 17, 2003 03:18 PM
Comments

Ah, good. Another library in CL's hip pocket. Interestingly, James Hendler (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler/), while speaking at ILC, mentioned the lack of an IRC library as a reason he wasn't using CL when teaching his students. I guess that reason isn't valid no more.

Posted by: waiter on November 17, 2003 03:39 PM

This seems like a nice effort but I confess I was hoping for something a bit more sophisticated in a CL implementation. As far as I could tell it is not even multi-threaded.

Posted by: ah on November 17, 2003 04:59 PM

Perhaps I'm missing something (I've only really looked at the examples), but I can't see what's stopping you from using it with multiple threads. In fact, given that it appears to run its own event loop it'd probably be more useful with threads than without

What were you looking for?

Posted by: Daniel Barlow on November 18, 2003 09:44 AM

If you'd like to submit patches to the library so it provides a multithreaded interface while retaining the current functionality I'd be happy to integrate those into the CVS tree. Personally, I wasn't entirely sure how users would use the library so I thought I'd wait until I had some usecases before I decided on a multithreaded API.

You mention "not even multithreaded" which leaves me with the feeling that multithreading was one of several issues you spotted. Care to elaborate on the others?

Posted by: Erik Enge on November 18, 2003 10:26 AM

Not multithreaded? ;-)
I do not know how far Erik mutated my original sources but it actually was already used in a multithreaded application (my IRC Client WeirdIRC).
The statement about the non-existence of an IRC library as a lack of CL sounds quite strange to me since mine (on which Erik built on) was not even the only one.

Posted by: NeonSquare on November 18, 2003 10:45 AM

As for multi-threading, there are several ways to handle it but I was expecting a separate thread per socket read loop. I don't think the user should have to call "(read-message-loop connection)" after each command.

The approach taken in net-nttin-irc is very straight-forward and I didn't mean to criticize it. But I have seen many (and written 2) IRC client implementations and I was hoping to see a Lisp expert tackle the problem by writing a mini Domain Specific Language.

Posted by: ah on November 19, 2003 12:13 PM

net-nittin-irc actually can use fd-handlers on SBCL, meaning that it can process events asynchronously upon receipt of a message. This is obviously not as good as threading, but if you want, just spawn another thread to handle the regular message loop. That's that.

Posted by: Brian on November 21, 2003 03:34 PM
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