5 ms·

Scheme hits the App Store

52 points by prakash 17y ago

futuremint 17y ago
Good news to hear. Objective-C is alright as a language, but I'm excited to hear about some of my favorite languages running on the platform, like this Scheme and Smalltalk (http://isqueak.org/ http://isqueak.org/). I suppose I have no excuse to NOT make an app in my spare time anymore...
stuntmouse2 17y ago
MIRROR (site appears to be down): I believe I have got the first Scheme application past Apple review into the iTunes App Store. It is yet another Reversi clone, called Reverso. It is a combination of 90% Scheme and 10% Objective-C, written with Gambit-C Scheme. James Long has already shown how to compile Gambit-C for the iPhone, and I started from there. My Scheme code is compiled to C by Gambit and later by GCC to produce native ARM code, bundled in a static library, which is ok with the iPhone SDK license agreement. The Objective-C then calls the library as a pure C library. The Scheme code deals with position evaluation, alpha-beta pruning, transposition tables, move legality, different strategies and so on. The Objective-C code deals with sound, animations, GUI, user preferences, basically everything that calls the iPhone OS API. Reversi was chosen because I like strategy games and it is much more algorithmic than artistic, and I am no artist. The performance of the code is excellent. I used some Gambit-specific declarations, only fixnum arithmetic, pre-allocated a large heap, and called the garbage-collector every time the user needed to think. The search is not memory intensive, but the transposition tables are. I did not write a specific hash function but relied on Gambit-C’s table type. The boards used during search were retrieved from a pool (the newest Gambit-C has made subu8vector-move! a public API), so they did not put pressure on the garbage-collector. In the end it was a very successful experiment. Developing with Scheme is orders of magnitude more productive than with most other languages. Gambit-C is also one of the best Scheme compilers out there, and made my job a lot easier.
- jjs 17y ago
  > The Scheme code deals with position evaluation, alpha-beta pruning, transposition tables, move legality, different strategies and so on. For some reason, those sound like compiler optimizations instead of game calculations...
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- stuntmouse2 17y ago
  LINKS: Reverso: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=334979538&mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa... Gambit Scheme: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P... James Longster - Scheme on the iPhone: http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-scheme/ http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem...
  - stuntmouse 17y ago
    Correction: That should read 'James Long' instead of 'James Longster'.
stuntmouse 17y ago
Most important software launch of the week.
morphir 17y ago
how is Gambit compared to Chicken?
- stuntmouse 17y ago
  In what respect? Benchmarks by Marc Feeley of Gambit: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html
  - morphir 17y ago
    In general. Who has the best performance? Who has the best ffi support? The most and best library support? Does anyone have a success story (case study)? Does anyone offer a painfree setup? Chicken is BSD, while Gambit i GPL - so chicken maybe preferred for its less restrictive lisence?
    - stuntmouse 17y ago
      I have to prefix this with the fact that I've only barely touched Chicken. I've been using Gambit for a few months. Performance: See benchmarks above. FFI: Gambit's is very clean. I've used this extensively, and people that are doing iPhone/Objective-C stuff with it are using the FFI. I can't comment on Chicken's FFI. Libraries: I'm guessing Chicken wins here. The egg system seems more developed and has more packages than Gambit's Black Hole. Installation: I know Gambit is painless on Linux and Mac. I can't speak to Windows nor to which Linux distros package it. Licensing: I have to correct you here. Gambit is dual licensed: LGPL 2.1 and Apache 2. Support: Chicken's community and IRC room seem active. Gambit's are too; detailed answers are rapid on the mailing list.
      - stuntmouse 17y ago
        Installation: For the record, I looked into prebuilt binaries for Gambit. The support is quite extensive for Mac and Windows. Mac: installers provided for G3, G4, G5, X86, X86-64, and universal binaries. Windows: installers for Gambit compiled with MSVC and mingw. The latest version (4.5.2) is available here: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/prebuilt/ http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/pre... Canonical download link: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distributions http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distri...
pistoriusp 17y ago
I have no idea why everyone wants to get around objective-c, it's really not complicated to learn.
- elai 17y ago
  Because dictionaries, object-arrays, strings and other fundamentals are way more verbose than they should be: someDictionary["bla"][3] vs. [[someDictionary objectForKey:@"bla"] objectAtIndex:3]; someDictionary["bla"] = 5 vs.[someDictionary setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:5] forKey:@"bla"]; "%@ - %@" % (date, name) vs. [NSString stringWithFormatString:@"%@ - %@",date,name]; Smalltalk is a lot better than objective-c even, because you can define binary & unary operators with singular symbols to make a far more concise syntax. You think you have done alot of work sometimes in objective-c when you find out that you were just extracting some values out of variables and putting it into this or that dictionary or array.

52 points by prakash 17y ago

Good news to hear. Objective-C is alright as a language, but I'm excited to hear about some of my favorite languages running on the platform, like this Scheme and Smalltalk (http://isqueak.org/ http://isqueak.org/). I suppose I have no excuse to NOT make an app in my spare time anymore...

stuntmouse2 17y ago

MIRROR (site appears to be down): I believe I have got the first Scheme application past Apple review into the iTunes App Store. It is yet another Reversi clone, called Reverso. It is a combination of 90% Scheme and 10% Objective-C, written with Gambit-C Scheme. James Long has already shown how to compile Gambit-C for the iPhone, and I started from there. My Scheme code is compiled to C by Gambit and later by GCC to produce native ARM code, bundled in a static library, which is ok with the iPhone SDK license agreement. The Objective-C then calls the library as a pure C library. The Scheme code deals with position evaluation, alpha-beta pruning, transposition tables, move legality, different strategies and so on. The Objective-C code deals with sound, animations, GUI, user preferences, basically everything that calls the iPhone OS API. Reversi was chosen because I like strategy games and it is much more algorithmic than artistic, and I am no artist. The performance of the code is excellent. I used some Gambit-specific declarations, only fixnum arithmetic, pre-allocated a large heap, and called the garbage-collector every time the user needed to think. The search is not memory intensive, but the transposition tables are. I did not write a specific hash function but relied on Gambit-C’s table type. The boards used during search were retrieved from a pool (the newest Gambit-C has made subu8vector-move! a public API), so they did not put pressure on the garbage-collector. In the end it was a very successful experiment. Developing with Scheme is orders of magnitude more productive than with most other languages. Gambit-C is also one of the best Scheme compilers out there, and made my job a lot easier.

jjs 17y ago
> The Scheme code deals with position evaluation, alpha-beta pruning, transposition tables, move legality, different strategies and so on. For some reason, those sound like compiler optimizations instead of game calculations...
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
stuntmouse2 17y ago
LINKS: Reverso: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=334979538&mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa... Gambit Scheme: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P... James Longster - Scheme on the iPhone: http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-scheme/ http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem...
- stuntmouse 17y ago
  Correction: That should read 'James Long' instead of 'James Longster'.

stuntmouse 17y ago

Most important software launch of the week.

morphir 17y ago

how is Gambit compared to Chicken?

stuntmouse 17y ago
In what respect? Benchmarks by Marc Feeley of Gambit: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bench.html
- morphir 17y ago
  In general. Who has the best performance? Who has the best ffi support? The most and best library support? Does anyone have a success story (case study)? Does anyone offer a painfree setup? Chicken is BSD, while Gambit i GPL - so chicken maybe preferred for its less restrictive lisence?
  - stuntmouse 17y ago
    I have to prefix this with the fact that I've only barely touched Chicken. I've been using Gambit for a few months. Performance: See benchmarks above. FFI: Gambit's is very clean. I've used this extensively, and people that are doing iPhone/Objective-C stuff with it are using the FFI. I can't comment on Chicken's FFI. Libraries: I'm guessing Chicken wins here. The egg system seems more developed and has more packages than Gambit's Black Hole. Installation: I know Gambit is painless on Linux and Mac. I can't speak to Windows nor to which Linux distros package it. Licensing: I have to correct you here. Gambit is dual licensed: LGPL 2.1 and Apache 2. Support: Chicken's community and IRC room seem active. Gambit's are too; detailed answers are rapid on the mailing list.
    - stuntmouse 17y ago
      Installation: For the record, I looked into prebuilt binaries for Gambit. The support is quite extensive for Mac and Windows. Mac: installers provided for G3, G4, G5, X86, X86-64, and universal binaries. Windows: installers for Gambit compiled with MSVC and mingw. The latest version (4.5.2) is available here: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/prebuilt/ http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.5/pre... Canonical download link: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distributions http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Distri...

pistoriusp 17y ago

I have no idea why everyone wants to get around objective-c, it's really not complicated to learn.

elai 17y ago
Because dictionaries, object-arrays, strings and other fundamentals are way more verbose than they should be: someDictionary["bla"][3] vs. [[someDictionary objectForKey:@"bla"] objectAtIndex:3]; someDictionary["bla"] = 5 vs.[someDictionary setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:5] forKey:@"bla"]; "%@ - %@" % (date, name) vs. [NSString stringWithFormatString:@"%@ - %@",date,name]; Smalltalk is a lot better than objective-c even, because you can define binary & unary operators with singular symbols to make a far more concise syntax. You think you have done alot of work sometimes in objective-c when you find out that you were just extracting some values out of variables and putting it into this or that dictionary or array.