[gambit-list] The future of Gambit

|/|/ Bendick wbendick at gmail.com
Sat Jan 31 23:59:37 EST 2009


I've also wanted to fix a bug myself in Gambit several times but found
the code to be a bit too mysterious. I agree that if one subsystem's
coding convention's could be fully explained, this might crack the
whole thing open. I know writing good docs is hard, perhaps it would
be easier to convince *someone* to get up and start speaking in front
of a camera and then just put it online. I think most people who are
interested in getting some work done on the gambit internals really
just want to know 'the big picture', namely.. what are the subsystems,
how do they fit together, and what are the common coding techniques
that make this happen.

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Bradley Lucier <lucier at math.purdue.edu> wrote:
>
> On Jan 14, 2009, at 10:27 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>
> Marc:
>
> Thank you for your reply.
>
> I'm thinking something along the lines of Shriram's talk "The Swine
> before Perl", which goes through an example of how to program finite-
> state automata using define-syntax macros.  To object to no
> documentation is not to demand full documentation---I've included one
> of my paragraphs above which explains that it would be nice to see how
> you think of programming.  Pick a subsystem of the runtime or of the
> compiler (the register allocator, beta-reduction, lambda-lifting, one
> of them), explain what the layers are, how and why you do it.  People
> would learn from it (I think I would be a better programmer if I
> understood it).
>
> Brad
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>



-- 
|/|/ Bendick



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