[gambit-list] Gambit Scheme Inside Out talk at ILC2010

REPLeffect repleffect at gmail.com
Thu Nov 11 21:26:07 EST 2010


On 10/21/10, Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> Hello.  I gave a talk on Gambit at ILC2010 yesterday.  It presents
> highlights of both the Gambit Scheme language and its implementation.
>
> You can find it at:
>
>   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/Gambit-inside-out.pdf
>
> The .pdf is 24MB so it might be a longish download...
>
> Many thanks to Guillaume Cartier, James Long and Robert Lizee for providing
> some nice demos.  For the record, some participants said that now that they
> know Gambit they see less of a reason to use Common Lisp (whatever that
> means!).
>
> Marc
>
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>

Marc,

The slides were very good.  Is there any audio and/or video available
of your talk.  It would be very nice for those of us who couldn't be
there.

As for the "now that they know Gambit they see less of a reason to use
Common Lisp" comment, I think I understand it totally.  Gambit
combines the clean design of scheme with some of the best things from
Common Lisp (low level "define-macro" macros, optional and keyword
arguments, for example).  I went back and forth myself about whether
to get into Common Lisp or Scheme.  I really wanted to do Scheme,
because it just seemed cleaner, but I preferred the look of low level
macros to define-syntax, syntax-case, etc.  Also, the fact that Gambit
compiles to C, and is therefore extremely portable was a huge draw for
me.  I wanted to be able to write programs to run on multiple
platforms (any *nix, Mac, and yes, Windows).  Running easily on
Windows is a big plus for me.  Being that I can't control what
platforms my users will be running, I want the ability to run stuff
anywhere.  SBCL has windows support, but last I checked it was still
labeled "experimental". CCL has windows support, but not for intel
processors without SSE2 (and yes, I found this out by installing it on
one of my machines with a processor that doesn't have SSE2).  There
are other Common Lisps that run on Windows, *nix, and Mac, but they
all appear to me to 1) not be free, 2) have limitations I can't
accept, or 3) not compile to native code (or to C code that can be
compiled natively).

Common Lisp is often described as a Lisp to get stuff done in, and I
won't argue that point.  But I think Gambit is an equally good to for
"getting stuff done", and I can see why folks would see it as a reason
to forgo using Common Lisp.



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