Why do people keep thinking they can use a garbage-collected language for “systems programming”?
My guess would be because it's been done since the dawn of electronic computing.
Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
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Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#22Why do people keep thinking they can use a garbage-collected language for “systems programming”?
I always wonder exactly what kind of "systems" these people are programming, clearly not any with real-time constraints. It almost seems like "systems programming" got co-opted to mean "not interpreted". At least that's what I noticed with Go's marketing. There are a few HFT firms, most notably Virtu, that use Java. But my understanding from having interviewed people that worked there is that it's so convoluted to av…
Many operating systems that use manual memory allocation and/or reference counting techniques are nevertheless unsuitable for real time.
Modern desktop and mobile device operating systems often exhibit embarassing lulls in responsiveness that resemble pauses in a rudimentary garbage collector.
Real-time operation can be "bolted on" to a non-real time operating system as a small specialized kernel which has higher priority access to the CPU and its own, separate resource management.
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#23Can anyone explain why there are so many implementations of Scheme written in Scheme? What is the point of doing that (apart from learning purposes)? I know, for example that people want Racket VM to be implemented in Chez Scheme because Chez is super fast. But what about all other implementations? Also, as I'm currently writing R5RS/Clojure hybrid in Kotlin, can anyone please share any _simple_ standard algorithm of…
Scheme has a strong tradition in programming pedagogy---it is the language used in SICP and other classic books---and writing Scheme in Scheme is what many of these books build up to. So writing your own Scheme implementation is a natural thing for many Scheme programmers to do.
As for Racket, IIUC the plan is to migrate the current C VM to a Scheme one building on Chez Scheme. It won't be that Racket will be running on Chez. The Racket fork of Chez and Racket itself will be one and the same thing.
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#24Already a handful of "how does this compare...?" postings but the standard for a systems-programming scheme is scsh, a find abstraction layer over POSIX dating from the nineties. https://scsh.net/
I think maybe there is a different interpretation of the words "systems programming"? I took it to mean a scheme used for developing close to the hardware programs, where as maybe others are taking it to mean a language which can be used to write common scripts and tools used by Systems Engineers.
Close to the hardware can also be done with scheme and indeed has been done in the past. Look at all the smartcards, running a JVM. For scheme, it just requires some engineering effort and there is not much demand for it. Btw, there is picobit(https://github.com/stamourv/picobit) which can be run on micro-controllers.
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#25Here is some context on Racket vs Gerbil by a well-known Common-lisp Programmer, François-René Rideau : https://fare.livejournal.com/188429.html
Some excellent comments there.
Looking around a bit, I came across a couple of implementations that might be of interest for those wanting to mash up "some kind of system programming" and "scheme": Bigloo (interpret / compile to executables, java byte code or experimentally dot.net) and larceny (interpret / direct compile to machine code / optionally via c):
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#26Can anyone explain why there are so many implementations of Scheme written in Scheme? What is the point of doing that (apart from learning purposes)? I know, for example that people want Racket VM to be implemented in Chez Scheme because Chez is super fast. But what about all other implementations? Also, as I'm currently writing R5RS/Clojure hybrid in Kotlin, can anyone please share any _simple_ standard algorithm of…
I'm afraid I literally laughed out loud at your request for a simple standard algorithm for r5rs macro systems. However, it's a sympathetic laugh. Macro Hygiene is still very hard, principally because (I claim) there's not yet a clean and widely accepted model for it. Matthew Flatt's "sets of scopes" model is (IMNSHO) the current leader. Time will tell whether he or anyone else comes up with a simpler and more widely accepted model. But yes: as an implementor, it "feels" very heavy, and you keep thinking that there must be a simpler solution to this problem (aside from just throwing the problem out and giving up on hygiene and language composability).
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#27(Mostly just hoisting Noel Welsh's comment to the top level) How will the expected upcoming move of Racket to the use of Chez affect the comparison between Gerbil and Racket? I'm trying not to set my expectations too high. BTW: RacketCon! This weekend!
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#28Can anyone explain why there are so many implementations of Scheme written in Scheme? What is the point of doing that (apart from learning purposes)? I know, for example that people want Racket VM to be implemented in Chez Scheme because Chez is super fast. But what about all other implementations? Also, as I'm currently writing R5RS/Clojure hybrid in Kotlin, can anyone please share any _simple_ standard algorithm of…
I'm afraid I literally laughed out loud at your request for a simple standard algorithm for r5rs macro systems. However, it's a sympathetic laugh. Macro Hygiene is still very hard, principally because (I claim) there's not yet a clean and widely accepted model for it. Matthew Flatt's "sets of scopes" model is (IMNSHO) the current leader. Time will tell whether he or anyone else comes up with a simpler and more widely…
Yeah, you are right. I've already implemented everything from r5rs, but macro system. And I don't know where to start, just can't wrap my head around it.
And people say that Scheme has a very minimalist design and is easy to implement...
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#29Why do people keep thinking they can use a garbage-collected language for “systems programming”?
Because it's a term that means nothing but makes for good marketing.
Re: Gerbil – An opinionated dialect of Scheme designed for systems programming
#30Why do people keep thinking they can use a garbage-collected language for “systems programming”?
I always wonder exactly what kind of "systems" these people are programming, clearly not any with real-time constraints. It almost seems like "systems programming" got co-opted to mean "not interpreted". At least that's what I noticed with Go's marketing. There are a few HFT firms, most notably Virtu, that use Java. But my understanding from having interviewed people that worked there is that it's so convoluted to av…
I don't tend to think of hard realtime as "systems programming". It's related in that a lot of the good languages for one are good for the other, but they don't seem like the same fundamental problem space - note that almost no OS kernels and even fewer base userspace layers (libc or equivalent, coreutils or equivalent, etc.) are hard realtime.