I think Gambit is suitable for the development of many real-world applications. Execution speed is not a problem, there are many extensions for real-world applications (FFI, threads, ...), and the debugging environment is the best that I know.
Thanks. I thought that your debugger was light-years ahead of other Scheme other debugger, but I wasn't sure. BTW Felleisen posted once that Chez Scheme (costs $$) had a good debugger. Could you compare?
The main problem is that marketing takes time and currently Gambit is mostly a one man effort (actually Brad Lucier has helped quite a bit in the past 3-4 years). I'm hoping that the features of Gambit 4 and the new license will attract more developers/contributors to Gambit and that this will broaden its user base.
Great. But (I hate to keep bugging you) would you even want hordes of non-experts porting their DrScheme programs to Gambit and saying, "Wow, that's blinding speed!!!" Maybe for now you'd like to keep it to serious programmers, either scientific computers, like Brad, or developers/contributors. The non-experts (like me) might tax the resources of your 2-man team, especially if they clutter up the list, as I'm doing :^0 Because you don't have to do anything to attract their attention: just say Gambit is case-sensitive and has a real debugger, maybe offer a tip about declarations, maybe read-all.
With appropriate declarations in the source code the executable programs generated by the compiler run roughly as fast as equivalent C programs.
That is not hype... it is reality!
That's amazing, Marc! Maybe we're having a cultural problem, since I'm from the US of A, where `hype' and `advertising' have much more positive connotations :) I wasn't trying to recommend anything sleazy.
But there's a real question, which I don't know the answer to: who do you want to use Gambit? If you only want experts like Brad (who 10 years ago told me to use Gambit, but I was intimidated (and thanks for the GC tip!)) to use Gambit, the manual is fine. Maybe you only mean Gambit to be a tool of the serious scientific computing community.