Hello hello, I'm working on porting a library I've written from Racket to Guile. Some interesting news on that soon.
In the meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my need for functional hashmaps in Guile. Right now Guile ships with vlist and vhash. Andy also wrote fash.scm, which is what I've generally preferred and used previously. The reason I don't want to use vhashes is specifically this part of vhashes in the Guile manual: > • It is _not_ thread-safe. Although operations on vlists are all > “referentially transparent” (i.e., purely functional), adding > elements to a vlist with ‘vlist-cons’ mutates part of its internal > structure, which makes it non-thread-safe. This could be fixed, > but it would slow down ‘vlist-cons’. Oop! That's a no-go for me. But maybe there are other reasons to prefer fash.scm too? There's no separate package of guile-fash available anywhere, but it would be easy enough to do if we're just using it with Guix. It's desirable to not have to keep copy-pasta'ing fash.scm around at least. My time in Racket has convinced me that it's an extremely good idea to have a well supported functional hashmap type in the language... extra points if it's "first class" in syntax (my code has improved considerably because of it; no more using alists where they'll bite you later just because it "looks prettier"). Anyway, thoughts? Nice to be back in Guile land! - Chris
