[gambit-list] Re: Gambit is great: the manual should advertise better

Marc Feeley feeley at IRO.UMontreal.CA
Sun Feb 6 23:52:45 EST 2005


> Thanks, Marc.  That's an admirable attitude, and I wouldn't want more
> hype than what you already wrote on page 1:
> 
>    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!

> 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.  

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.  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 developpers/contributors to Gambit and that this
will broaden its user base.

Marc



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