[gambit-list] Termite + Black Hole

Per Eckerdal per.eckerdal at gmail.com
Tue May 26 03:40:34 EDT 2009


26 maj 2009 kl. 08.00 skrev Jamie Briggs:

> On the Black Hole page of the Gambit wiki, in the "additional
> Libraries" section
> there is the line:
>
> 	Termite: A version suited for usage in Black Hole is found at X.

Hehe.. I wasn't aware that there was a page on the Gambit wiki about  
Black Hole =) But it's good that there is one.

> Are BH and Termite currently incompatible?  And if so, how?

Yes, the Termite distribution is incompatible with BH. It's primarily  
because of how Termite exports its macros; I don't have a deep  
knowledge of Termite, but from what I have seen of it, I have  
concluded that it's full of ugly hacks because of the insufficiency of  
Gambit's built-in features on that department.

Because of that I have, as a proof of concept of Black Hole, and  
because I think Termite really could use it, ported Termite to BH. The  
port consisted mainly of removing circular dependencies between files  
(BH doesn't support that) and hygienifying the macros.

The port is available on GitHub, http://github.com/pereckerdal/termite/

If you have the latest version of Black Hole, this is probably the  
easiest way of installing it: (It is rather hacky, because I haven't  
yet bothered fixing a nice URL for it, so you'll have to change the  
URL in the future, but it should work)

(import "http://github.com/pereckerdal/termite/raw/b60c4ee3943b1502cfd5e5f47530b174675f5235/termite.scm 
")

The URL points to the main termite.scm file, go there if you want to  
see what it looks like. Because the inter-module dependencies are  
relative paths, BH is able to deduce the URLs for the other files and  
will download termite.scm and its dependencies to ~~/lib/modules/work/ 
lib. This currently requires that wget is in the path.

I don't really know very much about the compilation problems in  
Termite, but you probably also want to do

(module-compile/deps! "http://github.com/pereckerdal/termite/raw/b60c4ee3943b1502cfd5e5f47530b174675f5235/termite.scm 
")

to compile it.

> I was just going to try using them together but then realized I would
> probably
> notice gross problems but might be not catch subtle ones.

Yes.. Because of the complexity of the Termite distribution, you'd  
need a rather deep understanding of BH and its hygienic macros to be  
able to do it. I don't know any way of making it easier to port  
libraries of this complexity.

/Per




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