[gambit-list] planning Gambit 5

Dimitris Vyzovitis vyzo at hackzen.org
Wed Nov 20 14:18:30 EST 2019


On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 3:55 PM Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Can you elaborate on these changes and how they will affect existing code?


> 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.
>
>
This will need quite a bit more testing and debugging! But I am dreaming
about the day when this becomes 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.
>
>
+1 for this.

-- vyzo
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