Butler

A Common Lisp kernel for iPython frontends.

See http://ipython.org/notebook.html for why this is cool.

Contributing

See the message protocol for implementation details.

Implementing a basic functional kernel only requires implementing:

• kernel_info_request
• kernel_info_reply
• execute_request
• execute_reply

At minimum... but it still won't display anything useful to the front-end. For that we'll need the IOPub channels and state messages.

Pull requests welcome.

Building

Currently developing on Clozure with the intention of supporting more implementations in the future. These notes are for building on Clozure.

First load the system with asdf or add to your quicklisp.

(ccl:save-application "butler" :toplevel-function #'butler:main :prepend-kernel t)`

Then create a Common Lisp iPython profile:

$ ipython profile create common-lisp`

And at the top of ~/.ipython/profile_common-lisp/ipython_config.py:

c = get_config()
c.KernelManager.kernel_cmd = ["/path/to/butler",
                              "{connection_file}"]

Then you can start it up with:

$ ipython console --profile common-lisp

Just don't expect anything to happen yet until more messages and sockets are set up.