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

Bill Richter richter at math.northwestern.edu
Mon Feb 7 00:20:07 EST 2005


   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.


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