6 ms·

LambdaNative – Cross-platform mobile apps in Scheme

138 points by landakram 9y ago

gliechtenstein 9y ago
This looks awesome! I believe being able to express an entire app logic as data can be super powerful. BTW shameless plug: If you're interested in this type of ideas, please also check out Jasonette (an open source project I'm working on) Just like this project uses "list" to describe an app, Jasonette uses JSON to describe an app. https://www.jasonette.com https://www.jasonette.com
desireco42 9y ago
I love it! This is awesome idea, now that I see it, I wonder why wouldn't Google just use it, if Apple will not, this makes total sense for mobile apps. Pair it with high performance native api, it can be winning ticket.
baldfat 9y ago
LOVE this project. My serious question is why wasn't this done in Racket as opposed to Scheme? Seems this would fit in Dr Racket wonderfully.
- Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
  Because racket isn't as easy to get running on smartphones as something that just compiles to C. With gambitc you are already there.
  - peatmoss 9y ago
    I know that, with Racket's move to the Chez Scheme interpreter, bits of core Racket C code are getting rewritten in Racket (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-dev/2BV3ElyfF8Y/4RSd3XbECAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-dev/2BV3ElyfF8Y...). I wonder if that might enable Racket to ultimately be able to run on other Schemes' infrastructure.
    - codygman 9y ago
      > with Racket's move to the Chez Scheme interpreter, Is there a wiki or an issue to track progress of this?
      - peatmoss 9y ago
        I don't know. I'm only familiar with it because of the Google Group posting and associated Hacker News story from a while back.
      - Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
        https://github.com/racket/racket7 https://github.com/racket/racket7
_delirium 9y ago
Previous discussion, from about a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11192542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11192542 And a paper (2013) giving some details and explaining their motivations: http://ecem.ece.ubc.ca/%7Ecpetersen/lambdanative_icfp13.pdf http://ecem.ece.ubc.ca/%7Ecpetersen/lambdanative_icfp13.pdf
- dmix 9y ago
  The phone apps look like they are from 2013. That explains a lot. Thanks for the links.
kronos29296 9y ago
This project blew me away. I always thought Scheme was just interpreters and toy programs. Hope this succeeds in making scheme popular. Scheme and Lisps in general way too underrated.
- codemac 9y ago
  Each scheme is actually much better than people realize at what it's targeted for. Recently I have to give huge props to Guile + Andy Wingo for guile-fibers. It's proper concurrency, using delimited continuations in scheme. Just frickin' fantastic!
- 1337p337 9y ago
  Stock Scheme does not have much in the way of interfaces to the outside world (long story) but there are several Scheme variants where people are doing larger projects. Racket is sort of a Scheme variant, and it seems to be the most popular, but Chicken and Guile are also pretty popular (as far as Scheme variants go) for real-world use cases.
  - _delirium 9y ago
    Gambit is another one that has some real-world usage (it's what LambdaNative uses).
    - 1337p337 9y ago
      Yep, that's why I left it off the list. I've actually written some LambdaNative. Unfortunately, we ended up going with Cordova, but you can guess which one was more fun to write.
winter_blue 9y ago
It's a bit inaccurate of them to present the results of a 17-year old paper (published in 2000), as empirical evidence that development time in Scheme is shorter. These days there are plethora of language choices on the JVM, and if I were devloping a multi-platform app today, I would personally choose Kotlin along with the Intel Multi-OS Engine:https://software.intel.com/en-us/multi-os-engine https://software.intel.com/en-us/multi-os-engine Part of my motivation to prefer Kotlin over Clojure (the most popular LISP on the JVM langauge?) is that I am a huge proponent of static typing. Large programs written in statically typed languages are orders of magnitute more readable, more maintainable, easier to understand, and far less error-prone, than programs written in dynamically typed languages. The recent surge in popularity of dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc, had been a source of horror and frustration to me. It feels like a huge segment industry is throwing away decades of advancement made in programming language research, and instead of moving to languages with more advanced type systems, they're abandoning sound typing altogether (shudder).
- wooby 9y ago
  > more readable ...to you. It's possible I suck at what I do, but somehow I've enjoyed building, shipping, and maintaining services and applications in dynamic languages. I used a lot of Clojure, and it was basically smooth sailing, even on teams. Along the way I used various statically typed languages, such as C# and a tiny bit of SML (to be able to read Okasaki), and enjoyed them too. Just not as much. Anyway, I can't refute your experience programming, or the way that you feel. With more experience, perhaps some day I will agree with you. But right now, for whatever it's worth, I don't. Dynamic (functional) languages all the way.
  - winter_blue 9y ago
    You haven't grounded your assertions on any logical arguments. I've worked on large code bases, both in statically typed languags, and dynamically typed ones, and the latter was a far worse experience than the former. Even just in terms of reading and understanding what was going, there was no way to know the structure of objects passed to various function. A function would take an object foo, which had some arbitary strucutre and set of fields that were not defined or specified anywhere. Pure hell for readablity (i.e. understanding someone else's code). The absence of type system enforced structure on objects, means these objects could contain anything. Grr. Everytime I get in production, a run-time JavaScript TypeError that would never happened had it been written in a statically typed language, I want to grab people like you by the collar (proponents of dynamically typed crap), and punch you in the face and give you a bloody nose. I think you have to be slightly fucked up mentally to not appreciate the beauty, the power, the clarity, and the safety that high-quality type systems bring, in languages like Agda, Haskell, Elm, Swift, Kotlin, etc. Dynamically typed languages are a bane. This is not to deny that some statically typed languages have a poor type systems. Early Java had a disappointingly weak and primitive type system (e.g. no generics). Scala's type system is so complex that it's worse off for it. Etc. But solid type systems are a huge advantage. I wish more people invested time researching and building more advanced and better type systems. We'd all be better off for it.
githubber123 9y ago
I'd like to see someone code golf that calculator in javascript.
alekq 9y ago
A recent example of cross-platform app/game made with LambdaNative: https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/6hng3q/i_developed_a_medium_sized_cross_platform/ https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/6hng3q/i_developed_...
gerbilscheme 9y ago
Gambit is a fantastic scheme system. The performance you get from it exceeds even SBCL in my limited use cases. Additionally, Gerbil Scheme (http://cons.io http://cons.io), built on Gambit, has expanded syntax like racket's #lang features for dsls. Several packages have also been create for it for most of the things I need.
- eggy 9y ago
  I used to play around with Gambit, but never saw Gerbil before. Thanks for the link. When do you use it over Gambit?

138 points by landakram 9y ago

This looks awesome! I believe being able to express an entire app logic as data can be super powerful. BTW shameless plug: If you're interested in this type of ideas, please also check out Jasonette (an open source project I'm working on) Just like this project uses "list" to describe an app, Jasonette uses JSON to describe an app. https://www.jasonette.com https://www.jasonette.com

desireco42 9y ago

I love it! This is awesome idea, now that I see it, I wonder why wouldn't Google just use it, if Apple will not, this makes total sense for mobile apps. Pair it with high performance native api, it can be winning ticket.

baldfat 9y ago

LOVE this project. My serious question is why wasn't this done in Racket as opposed to Scheme? Seems this would fit in Dr Racket wonderfully.

Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
Because racket isn't as easy to get running on smartphones as something that just compiles to C. With gambitc you are already there.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  I know that, with Racket's move to the Chez Scheme interpreter, bits of core Racket C code are getting rewritten in Racket (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-dev/2BV3ElyfF8Y/4RSd3XbECAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-dev/2BV3ElyfF8Y...). I wonder if that might enable Racket to ultimately be able to run on other Schemes' infrastructure.
  - codygman 9y ago
    > with Racket's move to the Chez Scheme interpreter, Is there a wiki or an issue to track progress of this?
    - peatmoss 9y ago
      I don't know. I'm only familiar with it because of the Google Group posting and associated Hacker News story from a while back.
    - Johnny_Brahms 9y ago
      https://github.com/racket/racket7 https://github.com/racket/racket7

_delirium 9y ago

Previous discussion, from about a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11192542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11192542 And a paper (2013) giving some details and explaining their motivations: http://ecem.ece.ubc.ca/%7Ecpetersen/lambdanative_icfp13.pdf http://ecem.ece.ubc.ca/%7Ecpetersen/lambdanative_icfp13.pdf

dmix 9y ago
The phone apps look like they are from 2013. That explains a lot. Thanks for the links.

kronos29296 9y ago

This project blew me away. I always thought Scheme was just interpreters and toy programs. Hope this succeeds in making scheme popular. Scheme and Lisps in general way too underrated.

codemac 9y ago
Each scheme is actually much better than people realize at what it's targeted for. Recently I have to give huge props to Guile + Andy Wingo for guile-fibers. It's proper concurrency, using delimited continuations in scheme. Just frickin' fantastic!
1337p337 9y ago
Stock Scheme does not have much in the way of interfaces to the outside world (long story) but there are several Scheme variants where people are doing larger projects. Racket is sort of a Scheme variant, and it seems to be the most popular, but Chicken and Guile are also pretty popular (as far as Scheme variants go) for real-world use cases.
- _delirium 9y ago
  Gambit is another one that has some real-world usage (it's what LambdaNative uses).
  - 1337p337 9y ago
    Yep, that's why I left it off the list. I've actually written some LambdaNative. Unfortunately, we ended up going with Cordova, but you can guess which one was more fun to write.

winter_blue 9y ago

It's a bit inaccurate of them to present the results of a 17-year old paper (published in 2000), as empirical evidence that development time in Scheme is shorter. These days there are plethora of language choices on the JVM, and if I were devloping a multi-platform app today, I would personally choose Kotlin along with the Intel Multi-OS Engine:https://software.intel.com/en-us/multi-os-engine https://software.intel.com/en-us/multi-os-engine Part of my motivation to prefer Kotlin over Clojure (the most popular LISP on the JVM langauge?) is that I am a huge proponent of static typing. Large programs written in statically typed languages are orders of magnitute more readable, more maintainable, easier to understand, and far less error-prone, than programs written in dynamically typed languages. The recent surge in popularity of dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc, had been a source of horror and frustration to me. It feels like a huge segment industry is throwing away decades of advancement made in programming language research, and instead of moving to languages with more advanced type systems, they're abandoning sound typing altogether (shudder).

wooby 9y ago
> more readable ...to you. It's possible I suck at what I do, but somehow I've enjoyed building, shipping, and maintaining services and applications in dynamic languages. I used a lot of Clojure, and it was basically smooth sailing, even on teams. Along the way I used various statically typed languages, such as C# and a tiny bit of SML (to be able to read Okasaki), and enjoyed them too. Just not as much. Anyway, I can't refute your experience programming, or the way that you feel. With more experience, perhaps some day I will agree with you. But right now, for whatever it's worth, I don't. Dynamic (functional) languages all the way.
- winter_blue 9y ago
  You haven't grounded your assertions on any logical arguments. I've worked on large code bases, both in statically typed languags, and dynamically typed ones, and the latter was a far worse experience than the former. Even just in terms of reading and understanding what was going, there was no way to know the structure of objects passed to various function. A function would take an object foo, which had some arbitary strucutre and set of fields that were not defined or specified anywhere. Pure hell for readablity (i.e. understanding someone else's code). The absence of type system enforced structure on objects, means these objects could contain anything. Grr. Everytime I get in production, a run-time JavaScript TypeError that would never happened had it been written in a statically typed language, I want to grab people like you by the collar (proponents of dynamically typed crap), and punch you in the face and give you a bloody nose. I think you have to be slightly fucked up mentally to not appreciate the beauty, the power, the clarity, and the safety that high-quality type systems bring, in languages like Agda, Haskell, Elm, Swift, Kotlin, etc. Dynamically typed languages are a bane. This is not to deny that some statically typed languages have a poor type systems. Early Java had a disappointingly weak and primitive type system (e.g. no generics). Scala's type system is so complex that it's worse off for it. Etc. But solid type systems are a huge advantage. I wish more people invested time researching and building more advanced and better type systems. We'd all be better off for it.

githubber123 9y ago

I'd like to see someone code golf that calculator in javascript.

alekq 9y ago

A recent example of cross-platform app/game made with LambdaNative: https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/6hng3q/i_developed_a_medium_sized_cross_platform/ https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/6hng3q/i_developed_...

gerbilscheme 9y ago

Gambit is a fantastic scheme system. The performance you get from it exceeds even SBCL in my limited use cases. Additionally, Gerbil Scheme (http://cons.io http://cons.io), built on Gambit, has expanded syntax like racket's #lang features for dsls. Several packages have also been create for it for most of the things I need.

eggy 9y ago
I used to play around with Gambit, but never saw Gerbil before. Thanks for the link. When do you use it over Gambit?