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Postings from July 2000
I realize you weren't asking me, but if I may be forgiven for answering despite that: 2000-07-20-15:42:04 John Tobey: > Joshua N Pritikin: > > For what it's worth, I think it would be cool to support guile. > > 1. using (explicit) refcounts or mark-and-sweep all-the-way-baby? Surely using Scheme's own GC. When you backend onto Scheme, GC is Somebody Else's Problem. > 2. Why?? Well, for starters, see (1.):-). And for another, if Guile's designers' claims are true, Scheme is an exceptionally easy language to back-end onto. And I can easily believe, or at least fantasize, that it would make a terrific intermediate language for subsequent code analysis to optimize, and I have the impression (although I can't cite references) that it's accumulated a great track record for embedded uses where it's providing the glue, and low-level libraries are doing the grunt, which sounds like a match for this job. And there are compilers available, which would give an alternate route to executable binaries, which could be useful, and would certainly be entertaining to some of us. And there's QScheme, which I've not played with yet, but if it lives up to its hype it might for the basis for a compile-and-go Perl that runs faster than anything we could come up with trying to do the job ourselves; certainly it claims exceedingly impressive performance characteristics. The key would be in the quality of scheme code generation we can pull off, of course. -Bennett