On Mon, 11 Dec 2023 at 03:35, Waldek Hebisch <de...@fricas.org> wrote: > > On Sat, Dec 09, 2023 at 08:26:57PM +0000, Peter Broadbery wrote: > > On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 at 16:47, Ralf Hemmecke <r...@hemmecke.org> wrote: > > > > > > Hi Peter, > > > > > > > I think the reference to 'Aldor folks' above is optimistic - I'd like > > > > to get a few more people helping with development (this is an > > > > optimistic plea for interested parties, to get involved btw). > > > > > > Yes, would be supergood to have more developers, but it's somewhat of a > > > hen-egg-problem. Nobody can get interested in Aldor if he/she doesn't > > > know about the advantages of Aldor. I'm afraid that FriCAS will not help > > > much. I try to have an eye on the generation of libfricas.al so that > > > Aldor is at least usable together with FriCAS, but what is needed is a > > > kind of killer application that shows why Aldor is good. Now many people > > > jump on the Julia train simply because they see faster development > > > there. It's hard to say how one can best advertise Aldor to other > > > compiler developers. > > > > > > > Yes - it is hard to sell without a strong application; unfortunately I > > don't have a strong sense of what a > > killer application would look like. I suspect that the algebra > > library contains several > > good starting points for anyone wishing to push it further. > > I am affraid that it works differently: you or somebody else have > a cool idea and use Aldor to implement it. There are some > necessery (but certainly not sufficient) condition for this. > First, Aldor must be good language to solve given problem. > Now, in abstract Aldor language is good. But when doing something > new there is a lot of experimentation and for this it matters > how smooth is developement cycle. First, one needs fast compilation > and interactive testing. Clear compiler diagnostics help. > IDE and debugger can make a difference. >
> Next, there is need for libraries. For math Aldor library is > resonable start, but is limited. FriCAS library gives more > coverage, so symbolic math is resonably covered. But symbolic > math is rather narrow programming domain and I think that > Aldor alone here have little chance. In more general context > people want database access, web framework, GUI toolkit etc. > For heavy computations people want multithreading and there > are tricky issues of parallel garbage collection. > > I am not saying that language must have all of the above, > but need enough for a succesful application. > > Also, for other people to join Aldor must be easy to build > and work on their machines. Which means either being very > careful to use portable constructs or have a build/test > farm of machines (possibly virtual) running several different > configurations. > > In different spirit: fact that Aldor is not written in Aldor > also is a disadvantage. You need a person that is comfortable > writing C and likes Aldor, and persons liking Aldor are > unlikely to want to develop in C. Also, given that Aldor > developers used C, Aldor users may have doubts about suitablity > of Aldor for serious projects. Of course, it is probably too > late to change this... > You make a lot of good points - aldor is steadily improving as both a code base and a development environment - I find it ok for the projects I have, but there is space to do more to improve it. For the user experience side of things, writing a GUI is hard. Common practice is to steal someone else's. In this vein, I've picked intellij as a starting point. It does around 80% of what I want - ie. host projects, compile on the fly, and jump between definitions, documentation and usages of names. Pretty much hyperdoc embedded in an editing UI. That said, other people want different things (or only use the One True Editor). The java and lisp ports can provide database, web and GUI - re-inventing those wheels would be time consuming otherwise. For the 'C' side of things, the Aldor code base is quite friendly - there are no issues with memory management (it assumes a garbage collector), and it's largely written in a very clear manner. As far as self-hosting goes, I have usefully experimented with writing the type system in aldor Rewriting the parser, codegen and optimisation passes would just take time. I'll put a bit more effort into the build environment - I guess a larger farm of agents would be handy. Peter > -- > Waldek Hebisch > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to fricas-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fricas-devel/ZXaDlBkRHhy-0C5o%40fricas.org. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to fricas-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fricas-devel/CAK%3DmBN9S_q-8R9rRRyWgLhUzVShtTzsTahbp2KU3NF5yWPpJwQ%40mail.gmail.com.
