[gambit-list] Gambit/Scheme internals guide

Hendrik Boom hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
Sat Mar 21 16:09:30 EDT 2020


On Sat, Mar 21, 2020 at 12:20:15AM +0200, Lassi Kortela wrote:
> > 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).

Surely not more work than writing the implementations in the first place?

> 
> 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>?


Perhaps on a wiki, seeded with the information already available?

> 
> 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.

This would be very useful.

-- hendrik





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