Hi all!
first: Good work and great idea! I am looking forward to read the answers to the listed questions. Seems like a great opportunity to learn a lot.
Missing points: Perhaps adding some question on the readtable implementation and six-syntax would be nice. This also includes how serialization works and how lexical forms (e.g. when write or pretty-print is applied to a data-structure) are generated (the ##wr stuff).
But I am pretty new to gambit and just wanted to use the opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to Marc for this great and inspiring piece of software and everybody like Mikael who pushes documentation forward.
Best
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Datum: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 14:47:32 -0500 Von: Mikael mikael.rcv@gmail.com An: gambit-list@iro.umontreal.ca, Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca Betreff: [gambit-list] Gambit internals documentation - draft of questions now on the wiki.
Hi guys!
Short summary: Please check section 4 and on on http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Design_guide, and please give feedback the next 10 days!
Long version:
Please find here http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Design_guide a draft of the Gambit documentation document spoken about in May.
The purpose with the document is to communicate to the reader how Gambit works internally in the core areas (compilation, the stack with continuations, memory and object handling, threads, and so on).
The document is a system of questions, whose answers from Marc will communicate this entire picture.
Until now there has been no such documentation, and I believe this document provides a suitable format to give the whole picture in an efficient way.
It's really important that there is documentation of Gambit's internals, to enable people to understand for themselves different aspects of Gambit's architecture, and make deep debugging and extensions.
I hope and believe the document will prove valuable due to the profound yet conceptual level detail it is at. It's profound enough to provide sufficient information for those those who want to dig into and do hard work with Gambit's internals, yet conceptual and brief enough for the user to read the document in its entirety and get how all of Gambit fits together, with lots of associated aha experiences.
I do believe that Marc's answers will give rise to some more questions in response, that will extend the document further a bit when they come.
If you have any feedback - suggestions for more questions, clarifications, or perhaps removals, then please tell them here during the next ten days!
Best regards, Mikael