Re: [ANNOUNCE] rep-gtk-0.18.4 (other scheme..)

[Eli Barzilay <eli barzilay org>]

On May  4, Chengqi(Lars) Song wrote:
> 0) extra/guile-gtk
>    Guile-gtk is glue code to make the GTK+ (the Gimp Toolkit)
>    accessible from Guile
> 1) clisp-lisp2: 
>    ANSI Common Lisp interpreter, compiler and debugger (with gtk2
>    enabled)
> 2) clfswm: 
>    A(nother) Common Lisp FullScreen Window Manager
> 3) stumpwm-git: 
>    A tiling, keyboard-driven window manager written in common lisp
> 4) cmucl:
>    CMU Common Lisp. There are two CMUCL bindings to the GTk+ widget
>    set. Espen Johnsen's clg binds directly to the GTk event loop via
>    the CMUCL FFI (GNU LGPL).  Gilbert Baumann's (older) binding uses
>    a client-server model to avoid problems with mixing two event
>    loops.

You should add plt scheme to the list -- it is full of useful
libraries, has a good ffi, uses a jit to execute code relatively fast,
it's very alive and under active developement, and it's big enough
that I can't write any decent one-sentence feature list.  I'm one of
the core developers, so I'll be happy to help with any needs -- like
adapting glue code or module syntax.  (And in case anyone wonders,
this is not a plug I'm dropping for nothing: I've been a sawfish user
for a really long time, and one of the things that always bothered me
was the choice of a language that is "somewhere between elisp and
scheme".)


> I think the advantage of guile is that it's used by gimp, [...]

No -- the gimp plan was to eventually move to guile, but this was
never done (IIRC, the reason given was that it's too big or something
like that).  So it's still using a very small (and not really good)
Scheme interpreter.  FWIW, I think that sawfish is in a different
place which justifies a good language: Gimp uses Scheme for writing
automated scripts but it's a C application -- whereas sawfish is
mostly written in Scheme (and with a good language, even more can move
to Scheme, making it easier to hack).

This leads to another question that should be considered: is it better
to have a C application that embeds a Scheme interpreter or is it
better to go the other way and have a Scheme application with some
library/ies that are written in Scheme.  I strongly believe that the
latter is a more sensible choice -- and was done once with the scwm
window manager (which I used before I switched to the more alive
sawfish).


> The advantage of clisp is that common lisp is a lot more powerful
> than scheme. but im not sure if it's a good or bad thing for
> developing sawfish.

I could say here that PLT Scheme is far more powerful than common
lisp, but what I should really say is that any specific implementation
of either Scheme or CL is far more powerful than that.  The real
advantage of CL implementations is that more is standardize -- but for
reasons that I can get to if anyone cares, that is not really a
problem, and even less so for sawfish.  The disadvantage of most
common lisps is that they tend to have a "monolithic repl" approach,
which usually makes them less convenient to embed or to turn to a
distribution.

The PLT Scheme point is that it is particularly powerful with a ton of
useful stuff.  Of course this could be a problem: the installation is
pretty big -- which is fine when you want to use it, but not fine when
all you need is a window manager.  The solution for this in PLT is its
ability to compile into "binaries" and/or distributions via its
command line compiler tool.  A "binary" is really a copy of mzscheme
(the plt scheme core) with byte-compiled scheme code attached; and a
distribution is basically a file tree holding only the files that are
needed for an application.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!