[gambit-list] planning Gambit 5

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Wed Nov 20 08:55:01 EST 2019


With all the changes to Gambit recently it is time to think about Gambit v5.0.0 which will probably be released in the next 6-12 months and include some backward incompatible changes due to the evolution of the linking model for the new module system.

Another backward incompatible change would be switching to multithreaded VMs by default, and the SMP scheduler.  But this will require community involvement to weed out the issues and make sure it is rock solid.

One backward incompatible change that could also happen at that point is a change of the default character encoding to UTF-8 (currently Gambit defaults to ISO-8859-1, aka latin-1, for all I/O unless configured otherwise with --enable-default-runtime-options=...).  The nice thing about the ISO-8859-1 encoding is the 1-to-1 mapping between characters and bytes, so a program can do character I/O to read/write binary files, which was the only way to do binary I/O in the old days of Scheme (so some programs might depend on that).  Nowadays many environments support UTF-8 well.

Please share your thoughts...

Marc





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