From: Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com>
To: "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>
Cc: 46865-done@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: [bug#46865] [PATCH] gnu: racket: update to 8.0.
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 08:35:52 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <d01e74c9-b927-41a1-e7c2-4241d5e28783@philipmcgrath.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87czwdlt1m.fsf@gnu.org>
Hi!
On 3/5/21 6:49 AM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> I applied it and tweak the commit log to mention the fields that were
> changed. The new synopsis and description LGTM!
That's great!
> Did you try unbundling Chez? It would be great if we could do that.
> (In Guix we unbundle software as much as possible, notably for security
> reasons.)
The Racket fork of Chez Scheme has diverged significantly from upstream.
Racket regularly syncs with upstream Chez and contributes patches back,
but they are likely to coexist as two different "flavors" of Chez for
the foreseeable future. There's a detailed (though almost two-year-old)
review of the differences in their ICFP report[1]. In essence, some of
Racket's "changes to Chez Scheme are either controversial or heavyweight
compared to the expected benefit for applications other than Racket".
You can see how one controversial pull request[2] became a Flatt and
Dybvig 2020 PLDI paper.[3] At this point, for example, Racket's Chez has
gained an Aarch64 backend, floating-point unboxing, and a
type-reconstruction compiler pass.
So, no, I don't think there's a prospect of unbundling Chez.
On the other hand, since sending this patch, I saw that much of the work
Guix and Nix had to do with around absolute paths could be better
addressed upstream. Racket has merged my fixes for most of them[4] (and
Matthew solved another in C [5]), which means we can greatly simplify
the package definition. I hope to get those fixes into upstream Chez, too.
I do think I should be able to unbundle Nanopass, as the Chez Guix
package does.
Just now I've been working on bootstrapping. Chez has the usual problem
that you need the old version of Chez (specifically "bootfiles") to
compile the new version. Racket's fork added an architecture-independent
backend: those bootfiles are in the source distribution, which are how
the Guix package is building now. But Racket is also able to simulate
enough of Chez to (slowly) compile the Chez compiler, providing a path
to Chez from just a C compiler. Racket does its whole bootstrapping
process regularly in CI, and I'm working on getting the Guix package to
do likewise.
(I knew from previous discussions that Racket on Guix could benefit from
some attention, so I'm hoping to use it as an opportunity to learn more
about Guix.)
-Philip
[1]: https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/icfp19-fddkmstz.pdf
[2]: https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme/pull/336
[3]: https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/pldi20-fd.pdf
[4]: https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/3710
[5]:
https://github.com/mflatt/racket/commit/7319a22ed605fb3110b98f6c9aa1e8ed3aa03794
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-03-05 13:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-03-02 0:43 [bug#46865] [PATCH] gnu: racket: update to 8.0 Philip McGrath
2021-03-03 15:06 ` Philip McGrath
2021-03-05 11:49 ` bug#46865: " Ludovic Courtès
2021-03-05 13:35 ` Philip McGrath [this message]
2021-03-05 16:06 ` [bug#46865] " Jack Hill
2021-03-08 14:33 ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-03-05 13:49 ` Christopher Lemmer Webber
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