[gambit-list] slime (swank) and gambit

Attila Lendvai attila.lendvai at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 22:48:15 EST 2012


hallo Marc,

> Hello Attila.  I was wondering how your swank for Gambit project was coming along.

it's stalled while i'm further exploring the possibilities.

when i was asking around compiler authors about having a single
swank-scheme project with backend-specific code in separate files,
i've found little enthusiasm. and as i'm not sure how deep/long i will
delve into scheme, i don't want to start yet another project that will
end up being abandoned and merely be noise in the scheme universe...

as of my embedded device: in fact it's not that much embedded... it
has 32MB ram and the OS on it is a linux distribution, so picobit is
probably not what i need.

so far i've played with gambit, chicken, and chibi-scheme, and for now
i'm further experimenting with chibi, which compiles out of the box on
my target environment (cygwin based gcc cross compiler, bleh! they run
linux and the SDK is windows+cygwin based... "for the convenience of
the programmer")

basically what i need:
 - little headache porting the scheme VM to the device (i must admit,
the gambit build infrastructure was a bit intimidating regarding this)
 - modular compilation, because e.g. there's no floating point on the device
 - a http client
 - preferably bytecode support (but text representation is also ok),
that i can http get to the device and eval (the actual program)

what is secondary:
 - speed
 - fancy features (the most complex stuff i need is an http client)

my plan for now is to compile the scheme VM and a smaller
loader/bootstrap code that can download, signature check and eval
scheme bytecode/text, which will be the program implementing the
actual business logic.


> Finally, talking about embedded devices, I've recently come across a cheap ($40) and super compact wifi module which contains 2 embedded ARM processors and a few hundred kilobytes of RAM.  It sounds like the perfect embedded platform for wireless sensors, tiny robots, etc (here's a link: http://www.semiconductorstore.com/cart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=47055).  I'm thinking of installing picobit on one.


sounds like fun! :)

i'm keeping an eye on http://www.raspberrypi.org/ and will most
probably order one when it comes out...

as of swank-gambit: i'm not sure when i will get back to it, so i've
attached my version of swank-gambit.scm that i've done parallel with
you. it may have something useful, e.g. a basic code to load slime
modules similar to how the CL swank does it.

but anyways, i'll be around, and let you know how things are progressing.

thanks for all the help!

--
 attila

Notice the erosion of your (digital) freedom, and do something about it!

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