[racket] Blog post about Racket

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 10:18:47AM -0400, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>> You can, and everyone else on this list can:
>>
>>  do not use the word 'macro' ever again.
>>
>> Period.
>>
Yet, I have you on record as declaring not so long ago: "my
understanding of macros is expanding".

(Says someone who's tried to enhance modularity of syntax extension in
CL without breaking backward compatibility, at high cost and for
moderate success... if your platform doesn't provide the correct API
and requires "cooperative" enforcement of invariants by all users and
providers of syntactic extensions, or what is worse, also from
non-users, you lose — Racket provides a much better API, at least in
this regard.)

>>> Making languages with different garbage
>>> collectors work together is such a pain that I am not very motivated
>>> to try. I guess this problem will ensure the survival of C for many
>>> years to come.
>>
>> A student of mine tried twice to integrate Python with Racket
>> some 10, 12 years ago. Painful indeed, and your conclusion is
>> correct.
>
> The world needs a good, flexible, exact garbage collector that can be
> used by a variety of languages.  Ideally, its interface to the rest of
> the world should admit of implementations that are just
> stop-and-collect, or stop-and-copy, or multicore for speed, or
> even concurrent with the mutator.
>
> And then all those languages can share it.
>
What about the MPS? There is evidence of it being used in
implementations of many different languages.

http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/version/1.111/manual/html/index.html

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Backwards compatible — If it's not backwards it's not compatible
        — Greg Newton <gregnewton at netscape.net>