4 ms·

Neat. Yeah, it's a lot better than it used to be. Oh, by the way, as somebody who primarily uses Chicken, you forgot about the coolest part: Chicken is slower

Neat. Yeah, it's a lot better than it used to be. Oh, by the way, as somebody who primarily uses Chicken, you forgot about the coolest part: Chicken is slower than Gambit, but it does Cheney on the MTA compilation, which means that call/cc is almost free. Given, there are some other tradeoffs, but it's still pretty cool. Also, what kind of job are you in where you're writing Scheme code? That's totally awesome!

shakna 10y ago
Getting to use Scheme was almost an accident. We had a dual Python/C stack, where we basically had a prototype in Python, running for small clients, and then a better C one for embedded devices. We decided that was a bad idea, and went to rewrite the C for both consumer and embedded devices. However, the lack of progress had the manager investigating all kinds of things, like MicroPython. I had been playing around with Scheme in my spare time, and pointed out that Scheme was almost as fast as C, and almost as fast as Python for prototyping. They handed me a test to see if Scheme was suitable -> Rewrite our Python prototype in Scheme, within three weeks. Because of how consistent Scheme is, and how close Python's syntax is to it, it only took me three days. With the decent C output of Gambit's compiler, I wrote a script that modified it to work on our embedded devices as well, in another three days. The manager was sold, and our whole team moved to Scheme. I was very unpopular for a few months. As to the actual project? The little I can say, as it isn't launched yet, is that it's a kit designed for schools.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Pretty cool. I can only imagine how unpopular you were, though.
- alexkarbiv 10y ago
  >I was very unpopular for a few months. Cython.
  - shakna 10y ago
    Cython simply wouldn't work. We were trying to streamline two products into one: * A C application that runs on an Arduino. * A Python application that runs on the desktop. Cython may make the Python implementation faster, but it hardly solves the distribution issues. There's a reason MicroPython exists (and it was one of the contenders!) Scheme became the product, because Scheme was easy to run on our hardware, and on consumer hardware. It was easy to develop with, fast to develop with, and runs faster than most high-level languages competing in this sphere. Cython certainly has its use cases, and is a fantastic bit of software. But it didn't fit ours.
bad_login 10y ago
In what ways having call/cc for free is usefull? The use of call/cc i see in real programs i am aware of is green threads.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ...mostly because it's so expensive. But you can use call/cc for all kinds of things: exceptions, python-style generator functions, delimited continuations, and famously, webservers.

shakna 10y ago

Getting to use Scheme was almost an accident. We had a dual Python/C stack, where we basically had a prototype in Python, running for small clients, and then a better C one for embedded devices. We decided that was a bad idea, and went to rewrite the C for both consumer and embedded devices. However, the lack of progress had the manager investigating all kinds of things, like MicroPython. I had been playing around with Scheme in my spare time, and pointed out that Scheme was almost as fast as C, and almost as fast as Python for prototyping. They handed me a test to see if Scheme was suitable -> Rewrite our Python prototype in Scheme, within three weeks. Because of how consistent Scheme is, and how close Python's syntax is to it, it only took me three days. With the decent C output of Gambit's compiler, I wrote a script that modified it to work on our embedded devices as well, in another three days. The manager was sold, and our whole team moved to Scheme. I was very unpopular for a few months. As to the actual project? The little I can say, as it isn't launched yet, is that it's a kit designed for schools.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Pretty cool. I can only imagine how unpopular you were, though.
alexkarbiv 10y ago
>I was very unpopular for a few months. Cython.
- shakna 10y ago
  Cython simply wouldn't work. We were trying to streamline two products into one: * A C application that runs on an Arduino. * A Python application that runs on the desktop. Cython may make the Python implementation faster, but it hardly solves the distribution issues. There's a reason MicroPython exists (and it was one of the contenders!) Scheme became the product, because Scheme was easy to run on our hardware, and on consumer hardware. It was easy to develop with, fast to develop with, and runs faster than most high-level languages competing in this sphere. Cython certainly has its use cases, and is a fantastic bit of software. But it didn't fit ours.

bad_login 10y ago

In what ways having call/cc for free is usefull? The use of call/cc i see in real programs i am aware of is green threads.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
...mostly because it's so expensive. But you can use call/cc for all kinds of things: exceptions, python-style generator functions, delimited continuations, and famously, webservers.