[gambit-list] slime (swank) and gambit

Marijn hkBst at gentoo.org
Mon Jan 23 04:20:15 EST 2012


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Apologies for butting in, but maybe my stating some obviousnesses can
rerail your conversation.

Vincent, it seems clear that Marc really wanted picobit (derivatives)
to remain cross-scheme and got a nasty surprise when he found he had
been thwarted in this. Probably racket provided some convenience to
you or is more familiar to you, so you chose to work in that. Maybe
you weren't ware of the cross-scheme nature of picobit. Maybe you
could explain your choice of using racket and list any racket features
that simplified picobit code so that an estimate could be made of the
effort of porting back to a (more) cross-scheme state.

Marijn

PS I think a big part of the current situation is that there is very
little effort put into reducing gratuitous incompatibilities between
schemes. Hash tables come to mind. It would be nice if such
incompatibilities could be brought up on comp.lang.scheme or
cross-posted between affected implementations or discussed on
scheme-reports or something such that we can start reducing gratuitous
incompatibilities and move on more fundamental differences from there.
Really it makes no sense to me that the only inter-implementation
communication seems to be when a new report is in the works.


On 20-01-12 20:13, Vincent St-Amour wrote:
> If you prefer that I stop working on Picobit in Racket, I will
> stop.
> 
> If you want, I can remove the code from GitHub.
> 
> Sorry for any misunderstandings.
> 
> Vincent
> 
> 
> At Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:52:02 -0500, Marc Feeley wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 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
>> 
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