>Greetings!
>
>A few observations regarding sockets in GCL:
(a lot of interesting and useful stuff snipped)
It is now clear to me that the level of familiarity with GCL's history
and the physical source file dependencies required to make these changes
is well above my current expertise. Although I might be able to make the
code work for my platform and distro, I don't have the means to test that
I haven't broken one or more implementations on other platforms, nor to
generalize the build and configuration process.
Regarding the issues of fork() and threads, yes, I would expect a general
implementation of threads to be necessary to make server sockets as useful
as in other languages (or maybe as in other Lisp implementations, as you
note).
However, in the particular situation I face at the moment, my "server" need
not be able to (and in fact, cannot currently) serve multiple concurrent
clients. Thus, I would be using the server socket only with one client at
a time.
My main need for now is a function to listen "passively" and produce
the same sort of thing produced by SI::SOCKET. I'm not particular whether
the form I employ is a keyword-based option on SI::SOCKET or another function
like ACCEPT-SOCKET-CONNECTION altogether.