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Racket-on-Chez Status

blog.racket-lang.org

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#31

Question from someone who knows barely anything about the Scheme ecosystem: It seems that the one of the motivations for starting this effort, besides performance, was to move away from a C code base. Is Chez Scheme primarily written in Scheme?

Racket is more of a meta language. For another example, see Gerbil Scheme (cons.io). It is a meta language written on top of Gambit Scheme. Gambit was chosen because it can compile to portable, efficient and fast C code. Gerbil on Gambit currently tops the R7RS benchmarks [1].

Actually, Gerbil used to be written on Racket. As you can see, it now benefits from Gambit's strengths without having to re-implement them...

[1]: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s now based on « Chez Scheme » ( https://scheme.com ).

I meant, why was "that" scheme called "Chez" scheme?

All about it on "The development of Chez Scheme" paper, written on its twentieth anniversary.

https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#33
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So will the current Racket language continue to be developed, as in new features, bug fixes and regular releases after Rhombus is released? Renaming doesn't help the case much here, if Racket's future is abandonware.

A bit of Googling landed me here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/-x_M5wIht... From there: Phase 1: Brainstorming (months) Phase 2: Iterative Design (years) Phase 3: Conversion (months or years) Phase 4: Transition (years) I am a nobody in front of people like Matthew Flatt, but this feels like Seconds Systems Effect taken to its extreme definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effec…

> An awesome lisp, a top successor for Common Lisp and a playground for experiments and initiating people into Lisp.

As good as its development environment might be for learning purposes and research, it is no match for neither LispWorks nor Allegro Common Lisp, so it is hard to be a top successor.

In fact there isn't a single commercial Scheme has successful in the market as those Lisp environments, with exception of ChezScheme, used commercially by Cisco.

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant, why was "that" scheme called "Chez" scheme?

All about it on "The development of Chez Scheme" paper, written on its twentieth anniversary. https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf

I don't see the name explained in that document. It does mention 'C-Scheme' and 'Z80 Scheme' so maybe Chez is a sort of interpolation of those?

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant, why was "that" scheme called "Chez" scheme?

All about it on "The development of Chez Scheme" paper, written on its twentieth anniversary. https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf

^ this paper is mind-expanding to see the huge evolution and depth of effort around performance optimization over years for this system

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#36
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So will the current Racket language continue to be developed, as in new features, bug fixes and regular releases after Rhombus is released? Renaming doesn't help the case much here, if Racket's future is abandonware.

A bit of Googling landed me here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/-x_M5wIht... From there: Phase 1: Brainstorming (months) Phase 2: Iterative Design (years) Phase 3: Conversion (months or years) Phase 4: Transition (years) I am a nobody in front of people like Matthew Flatt, but this feels like Seconds Systems Effect taken to its extreme definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effec…

really, if they are concerned about the 'teaching' aspect and parens being less new user friendly, why not just do a LUA-on-racket, maybe with some small extensions for the 'teaching' language - LUA maps to scheme pretty well, and its already 'done'.

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well PyonR is not a replacement for Racket. It's something totally a different project altogether. Rhombus is supposed to replace Racket. We could have PerlRacket or AwkRacket or RubyRacket and none of it should effect Racket, because you are using Racket as a language to build things, not exactly using RubyRacket as a replacement for Racket. This is how it rings to my ear. Racket as is, is in some way frozen when it…

> This is how it rings to my ear. Racket as is, is in some way frozen when it comes to features and big changes. Rhombus is where the next set of awesomeness will happen. You still seem to be misunderstanding how Racket and #lang's work. Rhombus and Racket will be the same language, but with different parsers. Big features of Rhombus will be added by adding those features to Racket. Languages in Racket are not develo…

>>Rhombus and Racket will be the same language

Exactly the point, one will have to bring Rhombus to Racket's feature parity, which by the link I posted, and the Racket people themselves acknowledge will take several years to happen. That much dev resources have to be dedicated to build a new language which will have the same feature parity as Racket. This effort could be expended to taking Racket forward. This is non trivial effort.

At the same time, you are hoping to attract users from Java/Python land(Who very likely won't come, given where your language will be(absence of killer libs, frameworks, books, q&a support etc)). While turning away existing lisp users. This ultimately becomes a disaster.

One of the biggest selling points of Racket was that it was continuously being worked on, unlike CL whose spec is frozen(putting it mildly, the real word would be abandoned).

Looks like Lisp has a lot of self destructive tendencies than anything else. Competition seems to be non existent. But Lisp communities just can't agree to work on things. A super massive pivot that just won't fix any real problems to existing users, adding very few incentives to new users, plus act as a resource drain, and cause your perfectly fine existing language to stagnate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503742

A similar argument is made in the above thread.

Regardless, of all this serious software also commits itself to things like stability and takes backwards compatibility seriously.

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#38
post #33
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of Googling landed me here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/-x_M5wIht... From there: Phase 1: Brainstorming (months) Phase 2: Iterative Design (years) Phase 3: Conversion (months or years) Phase 4: Transition (years) I am a nobody in front of people like Matthew Flatt, but this feels like Seconds Systems Effect taken to its extreme definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effec…

> An awesome lisp, a top successor for Common Lisp and a playground for experiments and initiating people into Lisp. As good as its development environment might be for learning purposes and research, it is no match for neither LispWorks nor Allegro Common Lisp, so it is hard to be a top successor. In fact there isn't a single commercial Scheme has successful in the market as those Lisp environments, with exception o…

Not to be rude, but apart from Clojure, other Lisps are non-existent in production compared to the software world at large.

One could even consider Scheme as more widely used than CL.

The biggest production use case for Lisp today is to learn Lisp.

The biggest use case for Scheme, CL, or Racket is to use to learn Lisp. Racket that way was quite successful.

With all this going on now. Scheme is the only serious Lisp for learning purposes. What new in sights will Rhombus provide here? The biggest use case for trying out scheme was while working through books like SICP.

Re: Racket-on-Chez Status

#39
post #38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An awesome lisp, a top successor for Common Lisp and a playground for experiments and initiating people into Lisp. As good as its development environment might be for learning purposes and research, it is no match for neither LispWorks nor Allegro Common Lisp, so it is hard to be a top successor. In fact there isn't a single commercial Scheme has successful in the market as those Lisp environments, with exception o…

Not to be rude, but apart from Clojure, other Lisps are non-existent in production compared to the software world at large. One could even consider Scheme as more widely used than CL. The biggest production use case for Lisp today is to learn Lisp. The biggest use case for Scheme, CL, or Racket is to use to learn Lisp. Racket that way was quite successful. With all this going on now. Scheme is the only serious Lisp f…

Except that they are, looking for a job in Porto/Lisbon? Syscog is always looking for good Common Lisp coders.

The fact that CL is used enough to keep two commercial vendors in business, shows how relevant it still is across some industries, even if doesn't do newspaper headlines.

More so than ever Scheme ever was.

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