[gambit-list] loc count

Jeremie Lasalle Ratelle pouexmachinax at gmail.com
Tue Feb 17 16:47:47 EST 2009


Do not feed the trolls! ;)

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>
>
> On 17-Feb-09, at 1:47 PM, lowly coder wrote:
>
>> Not impressed at all. In fact, why is Gambit so big? Why is there
>> 100K LOC for the *.scm s? There doesn't seem to be many built in
>> libraries. All for optimizing?
>
> Don't ask why but why not!  ;-)
>
> There are on the order of 200 procedures and special forms defined by
> R5RS.  Gambit adds another 800.  So there are lots of builtin
> features.  About 50 KLOC are in the runtime system and 50 KLOC in the
> compiler.
>
> I've written a few small Scheme's in my career... for example picobit
> is really small (it can fit in less than 10K on an embedded system)
> and BIT is just slightly bigger but it implements almost all of R4RS.
>
> So my question to you... why are you not using BIT?  That would be the
> best choice if you are worried about size and R4RS conformance.
>
> I suspect there are features of Gambit that you like and that make
> your life as a programmer simpler so you prefer using it to other
> Scheme systems.  Perhaps one of
>
> - feature-full debugger (single-stepping, backtrace, descriptive error
> messages, error pinpointing, live repair, etc)
> - space and time efficient scalable thread system (how many languages
> do you know can manage millions of threads?)
> - full-featured I/O system integrated into the thread system
> - ability to mix compiled and interpreted code seamlessly and to load
> compiled code dynamically
> - ability to interface easily with C code
> - one of the many extensions (homogeneous vectors, networking,
> subprocesses, hash tables, pretty printing, readtables, serialization,
> etc)
> - complete numerical library with fast bignum operations
> - etc (check the README file)
>
> All of these things contribute to the "user experience" that people
> appreciate when using Gambit.  You aren't confronted with these things
> when you first start using Gambit (and that's the way it should be)...
> you only see the simple > prompt.  But these features are ready to be
> used when you are ready to use them.  It is true that these things
> take code space, so that the gsi executable (essentially the Gambit
> runtime system) takes about 3 MB, but that compares favourably to many
> other language implementations (on desktops) and it takes only 15
> milliseconds (real time) to start and exit, so it is lightweight
> enough to use for everyday scripting (on my computer that's about 3
> times slower than /bin/sh, but still twice as fast as Scheme48 (which
> also has a 3 MB footprint) and about 30 times faster than mzscheme).
> So Gambit is not as "bloated" as you might think!
>
> Marc
>
>
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