How does Steel handle garbage collection? Would it be possible to manually control the garbage collector? For example, a game that runs the GC at the end of every frame.
Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
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Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#32Should have named it Steele since it's dragging Rust users half-way to Lisp :).
Why would you want to do that? Lisp is dynamically typed and has a GC.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#33How does Steel handle garbage collection? Would it be possible to manually control the garbage collector? For example, a game that runs the GC at the end of every frame.
Immutable values are reference counted, so for most code, things will be dropped when they exit scope. For captured mutable values, there is a fairly mundane mark and sweep collector. It is possible to manually control the garbage collector, however I have not optimized it for that kind of workload. If you were embedding Steel in a game, I don't think it would be explicitly necessary to tune the GC as long as you aren't using a ton of mutation. If you were using a lot of mutation and still wanted a relatively performant GC collection at the end of every frame, then the underlying GC implementation would have to be changed or swapped to a different one (which is not impossible - I just only have one GC implemented)
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#34I wonder where the name came from. Being HN, here is my nitpicking imperative:
Names are important. Our inheritance is wit, self-awareness, and irony; names that puncture ego and power and that appeal to joy: C, C++, GNU, Rust, Google, Yahoo!, Vim, Git, awk, etc. Others are beautiful, evocative images, like Apple and Amazon. Names communicate our culture and ideals to each other and to the next generation.
Careless, thoughtless names like Microsoft, IBM, etc. (ok it's ironic and self-deprecating, but without self-awareness or wit!), etc. should be hated and banned. Egotistical BS, especially Tolkien plagiarists who assert they are supernatural, should be tarred and feathered and paraded around town (with wit and irony).
(Plenty of names fall in some middle ground.)
If Steel is just a derivative of 'Rust' [edit: it is not, see the response below], it misses the self-awareness. Someone naming their development product - designed to build great structures - 'Rust' is engaging in a little self-deprication, joy, and self-awareness. Naming the derivative project 'Steel' possibly misses all that; there's a reason the original wasn't named Iron or Steel or Carbon Fiber. But maybe there's more to the name.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#35Should have named it Steele since it's dragging Rust users half-way to Lisp :).
Yes! I just posted
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#36I wonder where the name came from. Being HN, here is my nitpicking imperative: Names are important. Our inheritance is wit, self-awareness, and irony; names that puncture ego and power and that appeal to joy: C, C++, GNU, Rust, Google, Yahoo!, Vim, Git, awk, etc. Others are beautiful, evocative images, like Apple and Amazon. Names communicate our culture and ideals to each other and to the next generation. Careless,…
I don't think it's particularly careless: SBCL is short for 'Steel Bank Common Lisp', which is a reference to how the CMU university, named after Carnegie Mellon, could be respectively substituted with 'Steel' (Carnegie) and 'Bank' (Mellon).
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But they're also not required to flaunt their own ignorance as though it's a well-formed opinion. I don’t like the parenthesis. I’m not flaunting anything. Is it “flaunting” to calmly and respectfully share an opinion? To you it’s trivial, to me it’s not. It seems like you’re interested in creating conflict with people that don’t like a thing that you like. Which, I would cast this behavior as unprofessional, tbh.
I'm not a fan of the parenthesis either, but when I learned about s-expressions and how lisp programs are also a data structures that piqued my interest and helped me look past them. I question people's judgement who can't look past the syntax when there is a very good, and interesting technical reason behind them.
Code as data is interesting, but mostly orthogonal to S expressions. For example, Prolog code has the same property without S expressions, and more esoterically TeX (which is succinctly explained to a lisper as programming with defmacro but not defun).
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#38I wonder where the name came from. Being HN, here is my nitpicking imperative: Names are important. Our inheritance is wit, self-awareness, and irony; names that puncture ego and power and that appeal to joy: C, C++, GNU, Rust, Google, Yahoo!, Vim, Git, awk, etc. Others are beautiful, evocative images, like Apple and Amazon. Names communicate our culture and ideals to each other and to the next generation. Careless,…
So here is the history:
1. Guy Steele (along with Gerald Sussman) created scheme, and Steel is close to Steele, just drop the e.
2. Steel is a scheme, and I observed that scheme names have a tendency to be named things crime related: Scheme, Racket (racketeering), Larceny, etc - Not a scientific analysis at all, but I found it funny at the time that Steel sounds like "steal".
3. You made the observation, Steel sounds like something that would be associated with Rust.
Beyond that, I just liked the name. No SEO involved, and arguably probably should have picked something more searchable, but I didn't start making it with the intention of there being a lot of users, it started as a project for school.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But they're also not required to flaunt their own ignorance as though it's a well-formed opinion. I don’t like the parenthesis. I’m not flaunting anything. Is it “flaunting” to calmly and respectfully share an opinion? To you it’s trivial, to me it’s not. It seems like you’re interested in creating conflict with people that don’t like a thing that you like. Which, I would cast this behavior as unprofessional, tbh.
I'm not a fan of the parenthesis either, but when I learned about s-expressions and how lisp programs are also a data structures that piqued my interest and helped me look past them. I question people's judgement who can't look past the syntax when there is a very good, and interesting technical reason behind them.
> I question people's judgement who can't look past the syntax when there is a very good, and interesting technical reason behind them
The list of things that are interesting is endless, though. I see something I’m turned off by, I move on. There are plenty of valuable things to spend time on.
Re: Steel – An embeddable and extensible Scheme dialect
#40I wonder where the name came from. Being HN, here is my nitpicking imperative: Names are important. Our inheritance is wit, self-awareness, and irony; names that puncture ego and power and that appeal to joy: C, C++, GNU, Rust, Google, Yahoo!, Vim, Git, awk, etc. Others are beautiful, evocative images, like Apple and Amazon. Names communicate our culture and ideals to each other and to the next generation. Careless,…
So here is the history: 1. Guy Steele (along with Gerald Sussman) created scheme, and Steel is close to Steele, just drop the e. 2. Steel is a scheme, and I observed that scheme names have a tendency to be named things crime related: Scheme, Racket (racketeering), Larceny, etc - Not a scientific analysis at all, but I found it funny at the time that Steel sounds like "steal". 3. You made the observation, Steel sounds…
Awesome! Thank you. Someone else pointed out the Steele/Steel relationship and I was hopeful: