scheme vs common lisp

[Lyn A Headley]

A consensus seems to have emerged that we need to be practical.  We
all want to beg, borrow and steal whatever code we can, right?

 With this in mind, I propose that we can *significantly* increase our
productivity by standardizing on RScheme as our implementation
language of choice.  RScheme is quite simply a kickass language
implementation under very active development.  Features extremely
relevant to this project include: hard real-time GC, Modules, a
persistent object store (already done!), Threads, an object system, a
C interface, and good performance (compiles to C *or* bytecodes).
Anyone who hasn't seriously checked out the language, go to
www.rscheme.org (at least check out the /intro.html page which lists
the main features).  They have done so much of the work for us!  As
soon as somebody pops that sucker into Linux, the fun can really
begin.

RScheme's main competition from the CL folks seems to be CMUCL whose
main strength, from what I gather, is that it is really fast.  I also
_hear_ (please correct me if I am wrong) that the implementation is
huge and slow-compiling with a GC that we would eventually want to rip
out altogether.  It is also barely supported.


The choice seems almost obvious to me. *opens the flood gates.*
Let CMUCL die and embrace the wonderful world of RScheme.

But I can hear the rumbles already.  Shut up and write some code, Lyn.
After all, the *only* true measure of success is in how much code has
been written. (ok pretend like that was a segue back into the whole
democracey/benevolent dictator thing.)  I think people are right that
we can't just keep exchanging emails filled with wild speculation.
But I also think it's quite important to be able to measure the
group's momentum/opinions/community spirit.  Has anybody ever written
a web-based tool by which a community can hash out issues?  I've been
thinking a little about it and I think it would be extremely useful to
have a site which maintained bunches of current "issues," maybe with a
list of proposed solutions to each issue and a tally of how the
community felt about the issue at a certain time.  You'd just need a
server with names/passwords for each member, and people could change
their vote whenever.  It would be like an instant "snapshot" of the
group's state of mind.  That way people wouldn't just go out and hack
something totally random without at least having some idea in advance
how the group would react.  does this sound cool to people?

-Lyn