I think it would be great for there to be a way to give an (optional) hint to
the interpreter/compiler to evaluate (delay ) ed expressions in a background
thread. I assume that the lion's share of threading support will be in
R7RS-large, but with the trend of rapidly increasing core counts I think that
parallelism in some form must be tackled by any serious language at the
language level, and not delegated to its standard library.
I don't think record types belong in the core of scheme. As I understand it
the record definitions offer little more than what is traditionally achieved by
using a vector as a record, then defining constructors and accessors to operate
on that vector. This seems like an unnecessary intrusion on R7RS-small and I
think it is something that can be left to a macro in R7RS-large without any
loss of power.
Finally, given that the focus of R7RS seems to be adapting Scheme for
production code, and that R7RS-small seems to be the minimal set of additions
to R5RS necessary to achieve this, I think the C Foreign Function Interface
should standardised in R7RS-small. It would be a shame if efforts on
implementing R7RS-large were divided due to a variety of incompatible FFIs.
In general I am excited by R7RS scheme; Scheme is the cleanest lisp, and the
most pleasurable to code in, so it is frustrating that it has not been usable
for real projects. R7RS-large seems set to be solve this and fill the hole
left by the increasingly long in the tooth Common Lisp.
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