Plans

[Faré]

On 30/09/2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> wrote:
> I don't hate CL ... as long as Termite can be ported to SBCL, I don't
> see any reason not to go with SBCL.
I don't think termite itself can be ported to CL, and I don't think it
sports the important aspect of Erlang that you can send asynchronous
signals (i.e. kill threads at any moment).

Instead, I intend to implement a system that allows Erlang-style
thread-killing on top of CL, using a combination of fork and green
threads for selectable grain in thread-dependencies. I have started
working on it (have built green threads on top of arnesi:with-call/cc,
and some preliminary work on forking), but haven't invested enough
energy in it yet to complete the task.

Eventually, I would like a system that has user-declared hierarchies
of safe-points, as in my thesis, but that requires control over
code-generation for decent performance, and thus compiler support -
i.e. writing my own compiler or deeply subverting an existing one. I
still haven't really started on this one, and don't know which
compiler to subvert. Maybe the one from Movitz? or the code by Ian
Piumarta? PLT internals are some unworkable one-man thing, and SBCL
seems somewhat hard to subvert in such directions.

> But for a scientific workstation, the choice is really between Fedora,
> Gentoo, or Ubuntu/Lenny/Sid.
It shouldn't matter much, as we should write our code in standard
enough CL (or PLT Scheme, or Slate) to be bootstrappable from
semi-standard packages.

Bespin uses debian (soon to be Etch). I use debian lenny at home.
tarballs for whatever we bootstrap from should available on any
platform.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
Tomorrow will be different from today and from anything that existed in the
past. Tomorrow is a utopia. The only question is to determine which.