[racket-dev] using Racket to build an image-based Lisp: feasible?

On Mar 5, 2013, at 12:56 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:

> 10 minutes ago, mikel evins wrote:
>> 
>> But not having the capability to save and load an image provides no
>> advantages. Anything you can do without that capability, you can do
>> with it. The reverse is not true.
> 
> I'm not going to reply to each of your points (partly because I know
> how many of them hold, and partly because it will get tedious and
> off-topic...).  But the above is not a fair thing to say: of course on
> the face of things you don't lose anything by having an extra feature.
> 
> But looking at it more deeply I certainly lose something -- I lose the
> ability to use source code for development,

Come again? How does that happen? It has certainly never happened to me.

> which could be a real
> problem for me if I'm working on some code with someone remote and all
> we have to communicate are binary images.

Well, sure, if I were suddenly somehow denied access to sources and made to communicate with colleagues only through binary images, that would be a bad thing, but I'm not losing any sleep over the possibility. Matter of fact, it never occurred to me before this moment that it could ever be a possibility. 

--me