[gambit-list] The future of Gambit
Bradley Lucier
lucier at math.purdue.edu
Sun Dec 28 21:16:14 EST 2008
I've had a draft e-mail sitting in an IMAP folder for about 8 months
with the subject line "The future of Gambit", but with an empty
body. Today I still don't know precisely what to put into this body,
but at least I found a blog entry that explains a bit of my feelings.
I'm not exactly thrilled about the level of "outside" participation
in (core) Gambit development. In fact, graphing the Gambit git
commit log would be a parody of the argument in
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008.html
that the lack of non-Sun developers working on OpenOffice.org is an
indicator that it is not a healthy project. For there is only one
committer to Gambit, and the best that can be said about getting
other developers to develop code for Gambit is that a very few times
Marc has committed code he hasn't written himself.
I've studied the Gambit source code a bit, and even made some
contributions over the years, but Marc's programming style is
something I have not seen elsewhere---highly macroized and layered,
there are patterns in the coding techniques but not ones that I've
been able to unravel in general. Perhaps one way to help new
developers get into Gambit would be fore Marc to take a subsystem and
write down an explanation of how the macros and layers of code for
types, exceptions, constructors, functions, ... of that subsystem
work. (Christian Jaeger seems to have had some success in doing
this, but it would be good to have an explanation of how Marc sees
the construction of subsystems of the runtime.) Just to get an idea
of Marc's programming style would allow others to divine more easily
the structure of the code.
And happy holidays to everyone!
Brad
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