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Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

spritely.institute

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#41
post #24

It's fascinating how much development's occurring in Guile recently. Unfortunately, a lot seems to be ex-Racketers moving over. The splitting of community effort's sad (particularly as Guile e.g. greatly lags Racket performance or lacks nice libraries like Gauche).

Guile, being a bytecode VM with JIT currently, loses to Chez/Racket overall but it's honestly quite fast. I can make games that run at a smooth 60fps with infrequent GC pauses. Plenty of room to grow but Guile isn't slow by any means. I've never been a Gauche user but Guile has lots of nice libraries these days.

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#42
post #28
post #24

It's fascinating how much development's occurring in Guile recently. Unfortunately, a lot seems to be ex-Racketers moving over. The splitting of community effort's sad (particularly as Guile e.g. greatly lags Racket performance or lacks nice libraries like Gauche).

I'm happy for Guile to be getting more attention, but wouldn't write off Racket. A few quick thoughts... * The recent Guile work on WASM is promising. (Note also Jens Axel Soegaard's recent work on WASM with a Racket-related compiler.) * Racket's rehosting atop Chez seems like a good idea, and I'd guess that the Racket internals are now easier to work with than Guile's. * Racket has done a lot of great work, and is a…

> I'd guess that the Racket internals are now easier to work with than Guile's

Maybe, I couldn't say, but I find Chez's source code very cryptic and hard to read. More so than any other Scheme implementation.

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#43
post #24

It's fascinating how much development's occurring in Guile recently. Unfortunately, a lot seems to be ex-Racketers moving over. The splitting of community effort's sad (particularly as Guile e.g. greatly lags Racket performance or lacks nice libraries like Gauche).

I don't really follow Racket, but I recall that few years ago one apparently fairly significant contributor within their community wrote a blog post about Racket having a Missing Stair problem involving another even more significant (possibly foundational) contributor. I'm a complete outsider, cannot find that blog post any more, and also just not invested in the language at all, so I'm hesitant draw conclusions abou…

if it's Felleisen, then i'm surprised. i've met him on a conference for a couple of days about a decade ago, and my memory is of a nononsense guy with whom our vision of programming resonated a lot.

i was coming from the CL side of the isle, i hadn't known his work prior to that.

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#44

It's such an amazing project, I wish it used something other than Guile but you can't have everything.

Guile has lots of libraries though, and is the language of Guix. This makes it more likely for people to package their stuff via Guix. Guix itself enriches the ecosystem, and Guile projects can use Guix to make them reproducible. A few problems remain though. A good debugger, a good macro expander (geiser in Emacs is able to expand somehow), and solving the issues with R6RS library syntax and standard library binding…

Guile' backtraces are useless to the point it baffles me how the community can work on anything else, or how it's not the first item on any such lists as above.

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#45
post #24

It's fascinating how much development's occurring in Guile recently. Unfortunately, a lot seems to be ex-Racketers moving over. The splitting of community effort's sad (particularly as Guile e.g. greatly lags Racket performance or lacks nice libraries like Gauche).

> greatly lags Racket performance

This is a different implementation of Guile, though. Has Hoot (on, say, V8) been benchmarked?

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guile has lots of libraries though, and is the language of Guix. This makes it more likely for people to package their stuff via Guix. Guix itself enriches the ecosystem, and Guile projects can use Guix to make them reproducible. A few problems remain though. A good debugger, a good macro expander (geiser in Emacs is able to expand somehow), and solving the issues with R6RS library syntax and standard library binding…

If Guile had more of the "batteries" from the Gauche standard library it might be the perfect all-purpose Scheme. But for just writing a simple application quickly and easily it's been impossible to beat Gauche for me, it's on par with Python and Ruby in that regard IMO.

What kind of application do you write in Gauche?

I am asking, because I might want to get more familiar with it, if it is great for something like GUI or web app. I know there is Guile Golf, but to me it feels unfinished, and I experienced segfaults and crashes, when not doing things exactly as shown in examples and using standard GTK procedures, so that one is kind of out for me, and guile-gi is still changing and seemed kinda complicated to use. On the web front, there is Artanis, but it is too opinionated for me, not a minimalistic framework. Still can build things on top of guile fibers concurrent web server, but then have to build lots of things myself.

Recently, I used Python and tkinter, which works really well, and I would love to have good bindings for tk in Guile.

On my search for Scheme and GUI, I also found stklos, but I have no idea how ready it is and what kind of libraries I would have available, if I built an application with it.

Racket of course also has a GUI framework, that I have tried to use in the past, but it does not have a treeview widget. Has listbox though, with multiple columns.

What does Gauche have to offer, specifically for application development? (GUI, or web, or other)

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Guile had more of the "batteries" from the Gauche standard library it might be the perfect all-purpose Scheme. But for just writing a simple application quickly and easily it's been impossible to beat Gauche for me, it's on par with Python and Ruby in that regard IMO.

What kind of application do you write in Gauche? I am asking, because I might want to get more familiar with it, if it is great for something like GUI or web app. I know there is Guile Golf, but to me it feels unfinished, and I experienced segfaults and crashes, when not doing things exactly as shown in examples and using standard GTK procedures, so that one is kind of out for me, and guile-gi is still changing and s…

https://docs.racket-lang.org/rkt-tree-widget/index.html

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guile has lots of libraries though, and is the language of Guix. This makes it more likely for people to package their stuff via Guix. Guix itself enriches the ecosystem, and Guile projects can use Guix to make them reproducible. A few problems remain though. A good debugger, a good macro expander (geiser in Emacs is able to expand somehow), and solving the issues with R6RS library syntax and standard library binding…

> Guix itself enriches the ecosystem Except that ecosystem Guix provides is not on Windows nor MacOS, making a serious limitation to anyone who wants to develop guile on those platforms. I support GNU's mission in general, but I find it ironic that when they push freedom of choice you're forced to make the "right" choice or you're left twisting in the wind.

Better focus on developer platforms, than stretch resources too thin. Even if they managed to pull it off, they would need to maintain it. It is quite the different compile target too. Even if Windows was supported, probably many package definitions would have to change to support installing them on Windows. Ultimately, who is to say how Windows updates/MS will break everything? I really don't think they have the resources at this point to pull that one off. How about MS themselves spends time and effort to make things work on their proprietary platform instead, if they want to deliver a very usable platform?

Re: Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Guile had more of the "batteries" from the Gauche standard library it might be the perfect all-purpose Scheme. But for just writing a simple application quickly and easily it's been impossible to beat Gauche for me, it's on par with Python and Ruby in that regard IMO.

What kind of application do you write in Gauche? I am asking, because I might want to get more familiar with it, if it is great for something like GUI or web app. I know there is Guile Golf, but to me it feels unfinished, and I experienced segfaults and crashes, when not doing things exactly as shown in examples and using standard GTK procedures, so that one is kind of out for me, and guile-gi is still changing and s…

I should clarify that the "applications" I write are usually command line tools. I don't think I've ever written a full working GUI application, although now with AI I bet it would be fast and easy to bang something together.
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