[plt-scheme] Questions on PLT status and project structure

Time is the one resource that is truly limited. My observation is that
the core PLT developers spend the majority of their time working
towards goals with real identified benefits (e.g. implementing
compiler improvements) rather than hypothetical ones (e.g. documenting
the JIT so that some previously unknown developers will suddenly start
working on it). Plenty of people on this list, including me, are happy
to talk about potential projects but few (99.99999% of the time, not
including me) actually do anything concrete about them. I'd really
much rather the people who do work on PLT just get on with it, rather
than spending their creating structures and verbiage for no observable
benefit. If there was a demonstrable need for the things you list I'm
sure these needs will be met.

Hope you don't see this as a personal attack.

N.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Scott McLoughlin <scott at adrenaline.com> wrote:
...
> Second questions reqargd PLT as an open source project. Are there good
> documents on PLT internals and
> optimization/compilation strategies? Is there are formal "front end" vs.
> optimizations vs. "back end + more
> optimizations" style architecture to the compiler?  A simple matter of fact,
> is there a considerable number of
> community contributors to the "core group" working on the PLT compiler and
> runtime system itself?
>
> Third, is there thorough documentation (NOT academic papers) on the PLT JIT.
>
> Fourth,  Is there a formal roadmap for the Planet libraries - a sort of
> wishlist from the core development group
> or user community vote/consensus.  Similarly, is there an up to date raodmap
> for the core PLT system?
>
> Fifth, how well is the PLT system structures towards becoming a user-driven
> open source project?
>
> To boil all this down to a general scheme community question, PLT has become
> *very* popular in the
> scheme community (programmer community, to a lesser degree) at large. How
> stable a platform does
> it present for a future canonical open source project should the academic
> group behind PLT abandon
> the platform for one reason or another (lack of funding, changing research
> focus, etc.)
>
> Scott
>
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