Any reason why not to implement call/cc and then write fibers in terms of call/cc? The implementation may not actually be any different from what it is. (I've not studied the code enough to understand how it implements fibers, although I got the impression that it handles call frames explicitely (source/fargo/runtime/stack{,less}.js).)
Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clojure is a big language, and pretty deeply tied to the JVM; I'm not sure how you'd put it on V8. Scheme is pretty practical, though, once you get used to it.
The first version of Clojure was a Common Lisp compiler that compiled Clojure down to JS to be run on Rhino. There's interest in the Clojure community to have a Clojure "Light" that runs on V8 or SpiderMonkey.
I'd like to see it run in a browser also, that would be awesome.
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#23I've been working on Ralph for a while now: https://github.com/turbolent/ralph
It compiles a major subset of Apple's Dylan (http://lispm.dyndns.org/documentation/prefix-dylan/book.anno...) to JavaScript, both for use on a CommonJS implementation and in the browser. A bootstrapping compiler is implemented in JS, but the same compiler is also available in Ralph itself and features define-macro (Cl-like). The whole runtime is defined in Ralph as well and provides a single-inheritance object system (including next-method): https://github.com/turbolent/ralph/blob/master/src/runtime/c...
Almost all of the features are shown in https://github.com/turbolent/ralph/blob/master/src/tests/run... and I'm using it a project now. To build HTML5 apps, there's a small toolbox: https://github.com/turbolent/toolbox
Maybe it's useful to someone else. Cheers
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#24Any reason why not to implement call/cc and then write fibers in terms of call/cc? The implementation may not actually be any different from what it is. (I've not studied the code enough to understand how it implements fibers, although I got the impression that it handles call frames explicitely (source/fargo/runtime/stack{,less}.js).)
I was going to do call/cc but fibers are cheaper. The implementation is very similar, but because fibers can only be resumed once from the last yield you don't need to copy the stack when yielding and resuming.
They also require the user to explicitly start a fiber. This means when you're not in a fiber you can use a faster stackless engine because you don't need to track the state of the current continuation.
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#25Also, SibilantJS (which seems more mature at the moment, as `npm install sibilant` works, but `npm install fargo` does not): http://sibilantjs.info/#welcome
With regard to maturity, Fargo is one week into development. I'm not even sure if its just a quick hack to show off an idea or if it will become a production language. Certainly I have a lot to learn about compilers and VMs before that happens.
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#26I'm a newb or something but : (cdr ()) makes it explode. What's nil? null nil don't exist I do really like this. I was hoping for something like this where it would allow me to write lisp instead of javascript.
well, (cdr ()) is an error in standard Scheme, as empty list is not pair.
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't time to play around with Clojure yet, but what makes you think it is more practical than scheme? The primary advantages seem to be JVM interop (which I don't think would be applicable on in a Node.js setting), and easy multi-threading (also not applicable?)
Heavy functional bias. STM. Although, I don't know that those things make it more practical than Scheme. Just more desirable to a subset of people who like that sort of thing.
Hmm, that might be true. I don't like the java interop much, as it confines me to the JVM infrastructure that I really dislike.
Yeah, it might be mostly the functional bias. I was just reimplemting persistent immutable hast tables when I said, well dammit, why not try Clojure. And well, despite that I don't particularly like many things like lacking TCO, no continuations, and mostly probably the Scheme macro system, there is a lot of things that they did better.
I really like the data-structure access syntax (no more list-ref), I like that I have generic operations that work on any datastructure supporting the seq abstraction, I can see the point of reducing the number of parents in forms, I truly love that partial/curry is really part of the language, not in some implementation specific extension, I just love the -> 'operator'. Clojure is for me like Python, with much the functional programming support that Python did only get recently, with a community focus on this paradigm. Oh and with a great active helpful community in #clojure unlike the divided community of #scheme.
Before someone wonders: yeah, most can be implemented on top of Scheme, the point is that Clojure did it, and they are popular. Give me a Scheme with all the great things from Clojure and I'll never look back.
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#28I've been working on Ralph for a while now: https://github.com/turbolent/ralph It compiles a major subset of Apple's Dylan ( http://lispm.dyndns.org/documentation/prefix-dylan/book.anno... ) to JavaScript, both for use on a CommonJS implementation and in the browser. A bootstrapping compiler is implemented in JS, but the same compiler is also available in Ralph itself and features define-macro (Cl-like). The whole ru…
How is it related to the Ralph described by Mikel Evins at http://lispm.dyndns.org/news?ID=NEWS-2004-08-14-1 ?
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#29I've been working on Ralph for a while now: https://github.com/turbolent/ralph It compiles a major subset of Apple's Dylan ( http://lispm.dyndns.org/documentation/prefix-dylan/book.anno... ) to JavaScript, both for use on a CommonJS implementation and in the browser. A bootstrapping compiler is implemented in JS, but the same compiler is also available in Ralph itself and features define-macro (Cl-like). The whole ru…
How is it related to the Ralph described by Mikel Evins at http://lispm.dyndns.org/news?ID=NEWS-2004-08-14-1 ?
I like Dylan (http://www.opendylan.org/) and CL - and I wanted to write both server side and client side web applications in it, so I wrote a compiler for a Lisp that resembles the original prefix/sexp-style Dylan as much as possible, described in (http://lispm.dyndns.org/documentation/prefix-dylan/book.anno...).
As I needed a name, I just chose "Ralph" as that was the original code-name of Dylan (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programmin...). I'm currently implementing a web-based IDE for the OpenDylan compiler (http://www.opendylan.org/), called "Hula" (original code-name of Apple's IDE, see http://wiki.opendylan.org/wiki/view.dsp?title=AppleDylanScre...). The work-in-progress is at https://github.com/turbolent/hula.
If you're interested in a demo, let me know.
Re: Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser
#30Also, SibilantJS (which seems more mature at the moment, as `npm install sibilant` works, but `npm install fargo` does not): http://sibilantjs.info/#welcome
With regard to maturity, Fargo is one week into development. I'm not even sure if its just a quick hack to show off an idea or if it will become a production language. Certainly I have a lot to learn about compilers and VMs before that happens.
Hey, didn't mean to be mean, my apologies. I love to see people experimenting with new things. I may play around with it tonight :)