Re: Guile Steel: a proposal for a systems lisp

[Andrew Gwozdziewycz <apgwoz@gmail.com>]

> On Aug 7, 2022, at 07:47, Damien Mattei <damien.mattei@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Aug 7, 2022 at 2:44 PM Christine Lemmer-Webber <
> cwebber@dustycloud.org> wrote:
> 
>> Bigloo is cool.  I think it falls under the same category of Chicken,
>> which I address towards the end of:
>> 
>>  https://dustycloud.org/blog/guile-steel-smelting-pot/
>> 
>> "Chicken Scheme compiles to C but doesn't strike me as qualifying for
>> this post's vague definition because it still has the usual
>> memory/dynamic typing overheads of Scheme. But go ahead and read
>> literally everything on more-magic.net anyway because that stuff is
>> great."
>> 
>> Same feels like it could be said of Bigloo, but if I'm wrong, lmk :)
>> 
> 
> perhaps i'm wrong, but Chicken seems to have strict types as options:
> http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/5/Types
>> 

The actual thing you want in a pre-scheme is as close to “normal”-C as possible. Pre-scheme’s primitives leave memory management up to you, compile to portable C types, and that’s by design. There’s no call/cc, no garbage collection, minimal support for tail calls; it’s restricted.

So, even if Chicken has strict types for compiled C, it’s still “Cheney on the MTA” garbage collected, and continuation supporting, not the general, as close to the system ABI as possible thing to build on and link against.