Misc ideas & comments

[Chris Bitmead]

Rodrigo Ventura wrote:
> 
>         1. I tried RScheme, but it seemed to me too complicated, at
> first in a first glance. 

Complicated compared to what?

> After compiling everything, the whole tree
> ocupied about 70MB of disk space. I had some difficulty to find the
> main executable in the dense tree structure. I had to use "find
> . -perm 111 -type f" to find it! 

Yes, I'm not sure why that isn't installed by default.

> But of course, this is my ignorance
> speaking... The bottom line is that RScheme might be too complex to
> allow a fairly good degree of exploration. And by the way, does
> RScheme uses a virtual machine?

Yes. Unless of course you are using the compiler.

>         3. Is the gcc's RTL processor-independent? 

Are you talking about glibc ?

> If so, how about
> using the RTL-down part of gcc to make LispOS? What is the greatest
> difficulty of compiling scheme? The macro scheme? The need to stuff an
> eval function with the compiled code?

Well, if you could say there was something hard about compiling
Scheme, it would be that the general computational model of
Scheme doesn't fit that well with typical hardware architecture.
Supporting things like call/cc, gc, and all those things C lacks.
Eval and macros aren't a big deal.
 
>         4. The experience I made with scheme48 ontop linux used a
> statically linked scheme48vm. But maybe we could use dyn-load
> explicitly. How about considering the dyn-linking mechanism a part of
> the Linux kernel? It could make things easier for LispOS. Or maybe
> not, because scheme linking is probably more demanding than plain
> C-style linking. Maybe we'll need to use a lisp-prepared dyn-loader.

Depends on whether you are taking a long term view. In the short
term at least, Linux dyn linking may be a help. Not sure about
the ultimate solution.
 
-- 
Chris Bitmead
http://www.ans.com.au/~chrisb
mailto:chrisb@ans.com.au