[gambit-list] Gambit/Scheme internals guide

Lassi Kortela lassi at lassi.io
Fri Mar 20 18:20:15 EDT 2020


> Indeed that would be a nice documentation to have!  Perhaps some day I’ll write an academic paper that collects all the Gambit optimizations and tricks, but not now as this represents a lot of work (each backend has its own set of tricks, and there’s more than C… now x86, ARM, riscv, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, …).  You’ll find bits and pieces in the papers I have written over the years, but beware of “bit rot” (in the papers).

That's a great idea. That would probably make for a pretty massive paper 
by this point, even if it doesn't go into detail.

Can you gather an approximate bullet-point list of the current 
techniques? It could be just a simple text file. The rest of us can fill 
in the details and ask questions if/when we get stuck.

> You might want to coordinate with Adam who has started collecting implementation information on the wiki.

Sure. Is it this page: 
<http://gambitscheme.org/wiki/index.php/Internal_Documentation>?

What's your stance on having Gambit information in an aggregated guide 
to the internals of different Scheme/Lisp implementations? I'd like to 
have something that summarizes the GC/memory management techniques, 
thread implementations and object representations used by different 
Schemes. A basic breakdown of compiler optimizations would be useful as 
well. As said, Gambit's internals ought to compare very favorably to 
other implementations.




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