Guys,
While that Gambit makes platform-independent C code is great, isn't
something related we could give attention to more about Gambit, that it has
no required dependencies, or how is it?
Thinking about it and browsing through ./configure's code I can't see any.
I think I noticed it's quite common among Scheme implementations to require
quite many dependencies, sometimes even for as central stuff as garbage
collection, and obviously there needs to be architectural and performance
benefits of making these things customized in one piece, as well as saving
some resources and making deployment in any kind of unusual environment
exponentially easier, thus giving weight to the identification of the
software as 'system software'.
There are indeed many times when users quite strongly intuitively prefer
slimmer internal software designs that have no effect on how UI:s actually
look. Things like load time, UI latency, the direct and indirect effects of
CPU and RAM consumption such as RAM fragmentation, and grade of leaky
abstractions causing arbitrary small and big errors during installation and
runtime would be typical such things, in my understanding. This kind of
contrast ought also to be reflected in the very strong enthusiasm found
regarding certain computer manufacturers.
The only thing even close to a dep I could think of as being relevant for
Gambit would be optional bindings for libgmp even though it has a somewhat
weird license, now that Brad has been clear that there's so
much differentiated algorithms and architecture-specific custom-written
assembly in there that it not is feasible to maintain top-notch bignum
functionality on a per-language-implementation basis today. Libgmp's
interface in it's present state is averse to deep integration though, in
the respect that all of its small memory allocations are immovable, so
working through its sourcecode and resolving that would be of big benefit
for actually taking it in use. In all cases Gambit's built-in bignum
library will always be of use as it's neat in all ways.
Now, which are the deps - C compiler is optional, and file/process/OS
thread/time/network handling is OS-internal so those are not deps. Are
there any deps at all?
Any thoughts?
Brgds,
Mikael
