41–50 of 192 posts
I want this to succeed!! please do not let the word "srfi" ever appear in the packages list...naming libraries with obscure numbers no one remembers was a terrible terrible idea that all schemes seem to perpetuate
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance of seeing the things I miss the most from Racket in other langs? 1. Parameters and Syntax Parameters (Syntax parameters make macros more powerful) 2. Turing complete macros (not just syntax-case) 3. Typed Racket I almost used https://gamelisp.rs/ for a project but the nightly feature it needs broke and it's no longer maintained, glad to see something similar arise! You might want to consider adopting their…
To answer each of these: 1. I do support parameters now, syntax parameters not yet. I would like to! But Racket has a pretty hefty head start on me so it'll take some time. 2. Right now I have syntax-rules macros, I also have defmacro style macros that get used internally in the kernel during expansion, but haven't yet opened them up for user space yet. Syntax case will be coming soon hopefully. 3. The odds of me bei…
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.
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 are…
I 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…
(I always try and cram as many simultaneous jokes as possible into project names - and have a soft spot for lisp - so I wish you much joy and whatever level of success is most fun for you)
It sounds great but what is it exactly and what can I use it for? Is there an equivalent of this in other languages?
Use cases are generally for either configuration, scripting, or plugins - so scripting in games, or adding extensions to your text editor without having to use FFI or RPC + serializing a bunch of data. The advantage it has over using dynamic libraries (in general) is it runs in the same process, and can access the internal data structures directly without a lot of ceremony involved. The downside is that it is typically not as fast as native code unless a JIT is involved.
Javascript is an example of an embedded scripting, where the browser is the host application.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To answer each of these: 1. I do support parameters now, syntax parameters not yet. I would like to! But Racket has a pretty hefty head start on me so it'll take some time. 2. Right now I have syntax-rules macros, I also have defmacro style macros that get used internally in the kernel during expansion, but haven't yet opened them up for user space yet. Syntax case will be coming soon hopefully. 3. The odds of me bei…
Is that based on the VList paper?
Helix Editor plans to use Steel as a plugin language [0]. [0]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675
I want this to succeed!! please do not let the word "srfi" ever appear in the packages list...naming libraries with obscure numbers no one remembers was a terrible terrible idea that all schemes seem to perpetuate
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.
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 are…
In the game example I gave performance is important, but what's also important is consistency. Interactive apps rely on a steady framerate so what you want to avoid is accumulating garbage across multiple frames, then doing a single large collection pass.
In other words, it's better to do a bit of GC every frame than a bunch at once and risk stuttering.