Hi all, Now that I got your attention... :) Although the title is not purely click-bait, it is motivated by personal requirements.
Most of us are happy with the move to Chez (actually haven't heard anyone opposing it), but I would like to point to something I have felt over the past year and to understand if this is just my feeling or not from others (maybe Matthew) who have had any experience working with Chez. I have been, for over a year on and off, trying to port Chez to RISC-V. My problem here is really understanding the Chez arquitecture, rather than the RISC-V one with which I have been working for a few years now as a consultant. The whole point of the work was not to get Chez on RISC-V per se but to get Racket on RISC-V. My initial email to the Chez ML was replied to by Andy Keep. He replied in great detail on how to create a Chez backend - I have cleaned up his reply and have been slowly adding to it [1]. That was a great start but from there things started to fall apart. Further emails to my questions were generally not replied to (of the 4 messages sent, 1 was replied to) [2]. Then there is some backend rot... I noticed for example, that there was no Makefile for a threaded version of arm32 although the backend file is there meaning it should be supported. It seems that it's just that nobody every tried to build it. Then software floating point is an option in a backend config file but if you enable it, bootstrapping doesn't work because the compiler really expects you to have some floating point registers. Matthew mentions the move to Chez will help maintainability and I am sure he's right because he has been working with Racket for a long time but my experience comes from looking at backend files. When you look at them you end up being forced to look elsewhere, specifically the cpnanopass.ss file [3]. Well, this file is the stuff of nightmares... It's over 16000 (sixteen thousand!!!) lines of dense scheme code, whose comments are not necessarily Chez-Beginner friendly (maybe Alexis wants to rewrite it? [4]). So I am a bit concerned about this. I somehow get the feeling that what's going to happen is that Chez is going to slowly degenerate to a Racket sub-project, and nobody is going to really use Chez directly. Therefore this means Matthew et al. will end up maintaining it along with Racket itself. As far as I understand it, both A. Keep and R. Dybvig are both at Cisco and Chez is a side-project from which they are slowly distancing themselves. Chez becoming a sub-project of Racket might seem far-fetched until you noticed Matthew is already the number 4 contributor of Chez since it was open-sourced [5]. The only question I have is really, what do other people feel about this. Am I making any sense? Have I missed some hidden Chez community that's working day and night into improving it? Or is Chez current sole purpose of existence to support Racket? [1] https://github.com/LinkiTools/ChezScheme-RISCV/blob/wip-riscv/PORTING.md [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/chez-scheme/Paulo$20Matos%7Csort:date [3] https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme/blob/master/s/cpnanopass.ss [4] https://twitter.com/lexi_lambda/status/1092539293791330305 [5] https://github.com/cisco/ChezScheme/graphs/contributors -- Paulo Matos -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
