[racket] compiling Racket to android and ios apps

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Sat Feb 21 23:00:53 EST 2015

A solid Racket VM and GUI for Android and iOS apps would be awesome.

In the interim, two reasons why a solution using an R5RS Scheme might 
work well for a lot of Racket people:

* Lots of code written in Racket can actually be written in R5RS almost 
as well.  (Example: say that the secret sauce of your app was a symbolic 
planner or inference engine.  That library might well have been written 
entirely in R5RS in the first place, even if you only intended to use it 
with Racket.  So that key library source code could be shared between 
your Racket programs and your LambdaNative program.  And you'd probably 
do most of the other parts of the app using LambdaNative directly, since 
they're probably irrelevant to your Racket programs anyway.)  And there 
are a few different viable ways to close the gap even more.

* Much of a Racket programmer's skill transfers over easily to R5RS.  
(Idiomatic Racket programming is mostly idiomatic Scheme programming, IMHO.)

Incidentally, a decade ago, I switched from portable R5RS to Racket 
(then called PLT Scheme) exclusively, while keeping Gambit and Kawa 
especially as backup alternatives for special situations.  I think I 
actually suspected that I'd need one of my backups before now. Racket 
continues to perform very well for most all purposes.

Neil V.


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