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These are all very important issues...
On 10-Mar-07, at 6:12 AM, Alexander Sepp wrote:
>
> hi,
>
> i'm new now to scheme, and of course snow. after fiddling around with
> snow and esp. gambit a while, i stumbled over some things that keep me
> thinking and grumbling. So i have few questions regarding the
> scheme now
> framework:
>
> * Signature handling
>
> afaics, every file in a snowball archive has it's own signature.
> why is
> this the case? wouldn't it be cleaner (and simpler) to provide the
> signature over the complete snowball archive itself? the problem is,
> that if i can not verify the origin of a tarball, i do not even
> want to
> untar it.
The snowball structure is designed so that a package's parts can be
contributed, and signed, by different people. For example someone
may be working on the Bigloo port while someone else is working on a
Gambit port. The maintainer can then collect these (separately
signed) parts and just drop them into the package directory, then
upload the package.
>
> * Performance
>
> i did some quick tests with the digest package. i noticed
> a performance drop of 2/3 using gambit compared to the version in
> ~~lib/digest.scm (delivered with the gambit system). how do i get the
> performance back, still using the snowball?
That is odd. There is no reason why Snow packages should run
slower. I will investigate.
>
> * snow-* namespace
>
> if i want to use fixnum arithmetic, i have to write (snow-fxadd a b);
> wouldn't be (fxadd a b) simpler and maybe confrom to the upcoming
> R6RS?
> the same holds for (snow-u8vector...). latter is from my point of view
> another workaround for various duplicated srfi's?
The "snow-XXX" name is used when there is a possible name conflict
with an XXX operation on some Scheme system. Often snow-XXX and XXX
are related operations, but they may have slightly different
semantics (accepted number of arguments, result in special cases,
signaling of errors, etc).
I don't particularly like the "snow-" prefix and I hope that with
time the Snow packages can deprecate those names when the various
Scheme systems adopt a consistent semantics. A good example is fx+,
fx*, etc which should be standardized by R6RS.
> i hope these questions are not totally superfluous and already
> answered. i think the scheme now framework is a very clean approach to
> provide the fundamental base libraries needed by todays
> applications. i
> also appreciate to see native scheme implementions of crypto
> algorithms. normally, there are only questionable ffi wrappers
> provided.
Thanks. It was a lot of work to write those algorithms in Scheme.
The goal of course was to have a 100% pure Scheme implementation, so
that snowman could do package signing and certificate management
without requiring external tools (allowing one to run Snow on
embedded systems for example).
Marc
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