On 11-Mar-09, at 1:56 AM, Mikael More wrote:

Guys,

What is the status on module system development?

What are the next steps?

There hasn't been much progress on my side.

I think something that would help move things along is doing something I've been wanting to do for a long time: the modularization of the Gambit runtime system itself. This would mean chopping up the runtime system into smaller files which each represent a feature or a small group of tightly related features. With such a modularized runtime system it would be easier to implement a system to enable/disable features of the runtime system (smart static linker? user configuration? multiple distributions?) so that executables can be as compact as needed.

During this process I believe we would come up with a good way of modularizing code. This can then be formalized by designing the appropriate special forms that would in effect be "Gambit's module system".

It is important that this module system be lightweight and unobtrusive. It must be easy to understand and also easy to build on to implement other module systems, such as the R6RS modules or something like it.

Marc