Hello. Joseph wrote, 2020-06-19 23:32: > How do you perceive Bigloo? Do you see it as just an implementation of > scheme or as its own language, albeit heavily based on/inspired by scheme? > I ask because, personally, I am increasingly seeing it as a separate > language and am wondering if it would be beneficial to > promote it as such.
I have been using bigloo (and to a much smaller extent other Schemes) almost daily since 1997. For me and my projects, portability was always a main concern. Hence, I see bigloo as one of the most efficient implementations of R5RS (and hopefully of R7RS). If I found something in the manual marked as bigloo-specific, I skipped it or - if really relevant for a project - investigated its portability and maybe added a portability layer. My code base can be run on many Schemes, the main portability issue that bothers me is the lack of a portable and powerful FFI. I pick the Scheme implementation depending on the right choice of criteria that I need for a given task and the current point of the software development cycle: - quick and informative debugging - optimal runtime speed - reliable profiling - RAM usage - etc. It is not an exception that I use 2 or 3 from the set of Bigloo, Chicken, Gambit and Gauche on the same day. > So, would distancing Bigloo from scheme in a manner similar to what Racket > has done open opportunities for differentiating, growing, and popularizing > Bigloo? I may not be a typical bigloo user, but for me, this would weaken the Scheme community even more. Instead, I would like to see more and more cooperations between Scheme implementations in order to join communities and code bases. For some Scheme implementations, I wonder whether the implementers invest more time than all users of this implementation; this is ok, but this should not become a general pattern in the Scheme world. Greetings Sven
