[gambit-list] Truck-Factor by mtov

Bradley Lucier lucier at math.purdue.edu
Thu Jul 23 15:24:25 EDT 2015


On 07/23/2015 03:06 PM, Marc Feeley wrote:

> Documenting and writing unit tests for all the Gambit features requires looking through the source code, figuring out the function of a primitive, and testing it out (in essence writing basic unit tests).  And it *does* increase the truck-factor because those doing this will have a better understanding of the system, and other people reading the docs will also have a better understanding of the system.

OK. My feeling about this is that you're documenting interfaces, not the 
implementation, by doing this.

> Another task (not on the previous list) achieving the same goal is a refactoring of the Gambit runtime system to use the “define-library” form (https://github.com/feeley/define-library) which is very close syntactically to the R7RS module system but lacks hygiene.  This task would help clean up the source code of the runtime system (in particular it would get rid of many of the ## prefixes), it would expose the dependencies between the runtime system modules, and make the source code easier to read, understand and modify.

How does one use the "define-library" form?  Is there documentation 
somewhere, or does one just guess from the examples in that git repository?

> Helping out with extensions to SchemeSpheres and LambdaNative would also be good indirect contributions to Gambit.

I looked at LambdaNative a bit while I was laid up this spring, but in 
the end I didn't contribute anything.  Perhaps one needs to be more 
familiar with development on small devices, or perhaps I had other 
deficiencies.

Brad




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