On 10/21/10, Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:

Hello. I gave a talk on Gambit at ILC2010 yesterday. It presents highlights of both the Gambit Scheme language and its implementation.

You can find it at:

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/Gambit-inside-out.pdf

The .pdf is 24MB so it might be a longish download...

Many thanks to Guillaume Cartier, James Long and Robert Lizee for providing some nice demos. For the record, some participants said that now that they know Gambit they see less of a reason to use Common Lisp (whatever that means!).

Marc

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Marc,

The slides were very good. Is there any audio and/or video available of your talk. It would be very nice for those of us who couldn't be there.

As for the "now that they know Gambit they see less of a reason to use Common Lisp" comment, I think I understand it totally. Gambit combines the clean design of scheme with some of the best things from Common Lisp (low level "define-macro" macros, optional and keyword arguments, for example). I went back and forth myself about whether to get into Common Lisp or Scheme. I really wanted to do Scheme, because it just seemed cleaner, but I preferred the look of low level macros to define-syntax, syntax-case, etc. Also, the fact that Gambit compiles to C, and is therefore extremely portable was a huge draw for me. I wanted to be able to write programs to run on multiple platforms (any *nix, Mac, and yes, Windows). Running easily on Windows is a big plus for me. Being that I can't control what platforms my users will be running, I want the ability to run stuff anywhere. SBCL has windows support, but last I checked it was still labeled "experimental". CCL has windows support, but not for intel processors without SSE2 (and yes, I found this out by installing it on one of my machines with a processor that doesn't have SSE2). There are other Common Lisps that run on Windows, *nix, and Mac, but they all appear to me to 1) not be free, 2) have limitations I can't accept, or 3) not compile to native code (or to C code that can be compiled natively).

Common Lisp is often described as a Lisp to get stuff done in, and I won't argue that point. But I think Gambit is an equally good to for "getting stuff done", and I can see why folks would see it as a reason to forgo using Common Lisp.