[gambit-list] slime (swank) and gambit

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Fri Jan 20 09:52:02 EST 2012


On 2012-01-19, at 9:28 PM, Vincent St-Amour wrote:

> Picobit is available on GitHub: https://github.com/stamourv/picobit
> 
> The latest version includes an ARM port, thanks to Peter Zotov.
> 
> Vincent

Oh my god!  I see that you have converted all of the picobit Scheme compiler source code into Racket, which means that picobit can't run on any other Scheme system.  When I wrote picobit I was careful to avoid making it Gambit specific so that others could choose to run it on the Scheme system of their choice.  As far as I can tell the original picobit compiler ran fine under mzscheme.  Now that you have converted it to Racket, it has been swallowed into the Racket ecosystem to the exclusion of others, including me.

This is really ***NOT COOL*** from an engineering point of view.

This is really ***NOT COOL*** from a political point of view (dividing the Scheme community).

This is really ***NOT COOL*** because you did this without consulting me.

This is really ***NOT COOL*** because it makes it hard for me to contribute to the project.

Can you please explain what was the motivation for doing this?  Wouldn't it have been sufficient to add a #lang r5rs at the top of the files to make it work with Racket without breaking compatibility with the other Scheme systems?

Marc




More information about the Gambit-list mailing list