[gambit-list] My R6RS vote

Harold Ancell hga at ancell-ent.com
Mon Aug 13 09:46:29 EDT 2007


At 10:53 PM 8/12/2007, Jeff Read wrote:

>Marc,
>
>On 8/12/07, Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> Some of you wanted to know why I am voting against ratification of
>> the R6RS.  Here are the details.
>
>You said it much better than I ever could.

Certainly much better than I did, but I'm not (yet) an
implementer, and my targets included the "minimalists", trying
to get them to buy into a proper core (which R5.97RS most
certainly is not) that includes an acceptable library
system, and a set of official standard libraries that would
include reference implementations, so the floor of a
compliant although not very fast system is not too high, and
we can hopefully enjoy the best of both worlds.

Don't know if the above is really practical, but it was
discussed on comp.lang.scheme and seems to be the best way
to try to square this circle.  I take it as a given that
the "failure of the community to build a set of portable
libraries" (to paraphrase one voter cited in my essay) needs
to be addressed (properly!), and however we might e.g. like
Snow, it's not getting buy-in from some comments people made....

But if I help to SMP Gambit, I sure don't want the core to be
polluted by all that R5.97RS adds.

That's the one tasty area where I want to do implementation
work, although Marc's analysis of what it would require
and the performance hit it would entail for Gambit is ...
sobering.  But I'd like to use Gambit in a multi-core world
beyond the Termite NUMA model.

                                        - Harold







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