[racket] Anyone using Dorodango? Any other movement towards an R6RS package system?

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Ryan Newton <newton at mit.edu> wrote:
> PLT has PLaneT, of course, but personally I think it would be desirable to
> have basic, common packages target R6RS if they can fit there comfortably.
> If no one else steps up, can PLaneT be made a multi-language package
> manager, as Racket is a multi-language implementation?
>
> Perhaps those of us who want portability across other Schemes would port the
> basic PLaneT tools to work with the hypothetical subset of R6RS PLaneT
> packages?  Other Scheme's would be second class citizens, but it would be
> nice to have SOMETHING to plug into for packages.

I can't imagine anyone objecting to this, but I can't imagine any core
developers doing this either -- it doesn't seem like a high priority
to me.

I'm a bit conflicted about R6RS to be honest. I don't really see the
value from having many implementations. Look at Ikarus for example: a
great compiler but there hasn't been a new release for 2 years. Would
the Scheme ecosystem be better off with Ikarus as part of Racket, or
as a separate project? Surely the former. Now look at Haskell -- GHC
is by far the dominant implementation and even companies like Intel
(Concurrent Collections for Haskell) are taking an interest ;-P There
are only so many productive Scheme developers in the world. I really
think the Scheme world would be much much much better served by these
developers contributing their efforts to a single implementation.

N.