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Tom Novelli | 29 Sep 2007 17:44
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Plans

Greetings...

I met up with Fare for another informal planning session 2 weeks ago.  
(I apologize for the delay; I've spent those 2 weeks trying to make the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts live up to its promise of affordable 
health insurance.  But that's another story!)  Anyway, without further 
ado, here is a summary of our discussion:

WEB SITE

1. I will upgrade the CMS any day now (and rename it according to RMS's 
terminology - Website Revision System - which makes more sense to me!)  
Major changes include WSGI support, simplifications, and integration 
with the Member List, so any member/lurker can easily edit the website 
once granted permission.

2. Set up a GIT repository for code projects.  (forget DARCS, SVN, Monotone)

3. Fare has volunteered to set up UML - UserMode Linux.  Hopefully, this 
will give us a lot more flexibility while making life easier for Tril.

CODE PROJECTS

(What's needed is for a few core members to start something to show 
we're not all talk)

4. Let's declare Common Lisp our "platform of choice" for current 
development.  We recognize that it's far from ideal, and intend to 
replace it with The Right Thing eventually.  Meanwhile, at least we can 
use try out Tunes ideas as we write *useful* programs that run on
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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky | 29 Sep 2007 19:32
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Re: Plans

Tom Novelli wrote:
> Greetings...
> 
> I met up with Fare for another informal planning session 2 weeks ago.  
> (I apologize for the delay; I've spent those 2 weeks trying to make the 
> Commonwealth of Massachusetts live up to its promise of affordable 
> health insurance.  But that's another story!)  Anyway, without further 
> ado, here is a summary of our discussion:
> 
> 
> WEB SITE
> 
> 1. I will upgrade the CMS any day now (and rename it according to RMS's 
> terminology - Website Revision System - which makes more sense to me!)  
> Major changes include WSGI support, simplifications, and integration 
> with the Member List, so any member/lurker can easily edit the website 
> once granted permission.
> 
> 2. Set up a GIT repository for code projects.  (forget DARCS, SVN, 
> Monotone)
> 
> 3. Fare has volunteered to set up UML - UserMode Linux.  Hopefully, this 
> will give us a lot more flexibility while making life easier for Tril.
> 
> 
> CODE PROJECTS
> 
> (What's needed is for a few core members to start something to show 
> we're not all talk)
>
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Tom Novelli | 30 Sep 2007 20:17
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Re: Plans

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> About the platform -- Common Lisp? Why not Gambit Scheme? You get:
>
> 1. Scheme, of course, both compiled and interpreted
> 2. Termite -- Erlang-style concurrency embedded in Scheme.
>
> I don't know how efficient Gambit is relative to the other C-based 
> Scheme implementations, although I think it's slightly slower than 
> Chicken on average. It's probably more efficient than SBCL, though -- 
> doesn't SBCL compile to bytecode rather than real code or C?
>
> Or -- since you're "borrowing" from PLT Scheme, why not just use PLT 
> Scheme?
>
> But then, if it must be Common Lisp for some reason, SBCL is clearly 
> the one to use.
If CL is the first choice, Scheme is a close second.  Fare used to favor 
Scheme, but he favors CL now... he's written a lot about the merits of 
each over the years, on the list, his blog, and elsewhere.  He uses CL 
at ITA.  Tril's "Max" reflection project is in CL... Slate was 
bootstrapped in CL... and there are other Tunes members who prefer CL.  
It seems like this is one thing we can agree on.

I don't want to drive away talented people who happen to hate CL, 
however.  (I'm a reformed Lisp-hater myself.)  We're trying out ideas, 
and anything that works in another language ought to work in CL; and if 
not, that's a shortcoming we'll eventually need to address in our HLL.

I like PLT Scheme.  It's friendly, complete, and runs on all the major 
operating systems (unlike the *free* Common Lisps).  While friendly, the
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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky | 30 Sep 2007 21:22
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Re: Plans

Tom Novelli wrote:
> If CL is the first choice, Scheme is a close second.  Fare used to favor 
> Scheme, but he favors CL now... he's written a lot about the merits of 
> each over the years, on the list, his blog, and elsewhere.  He uses CL 
> at ITA.  Tril's "Max" reflection project is in CL... Slate was 
> bootstrapped in CL... and there are other Tunes members who prefer CL.  
> It seems like this is one thing we can agree on.
> 
> I don't want to drive away talented people who happen to hate CL, 
> however.  (I'm a reformed Lisp-hater myself.)  We're trying out ideas, 
> and anything that works in another language ought to work in CL; and if 
> not, that's a shortcoming we'll eventually need to address in our HLL.

I don't hate CL ... as long as Termite can be ported to SBCL, I don't 
see any reason not to go with SBCL.

> 
> I like PLT Scheme.  It's friendly, complete, and runs on all the major 
> operating systems (unlike the *free* Common Lisps).  While friendly, the 
> IDE is a little clunky... I'd get frustrated using it for serious 
> programming, but it's a good starting point.

If SBCL doesn't run in Windows, it's pretty close. I assume you are 
referring to *native* operation on Windows, not "MinGW/MSYS" or Cygwin 
operation! The other "major operating systems" (Mac OSX, Solaris, Linux 
and *BSD) shouldn't be a problem for any open source package.

> 
> SBCL, like CMUCL, compiles to native code.  Not that it matters, as it's 
> a complex monolithic system, and Fare assures me that we can't use the
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Faré | 1 Oct 2007 04:37
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Re: Plans

On 30/09/2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb <at> cesmail.net> wrote:
> I don't hate CL ... as long as Termite can be ported to SBCL, I don't
> see any reason not to go with SBCL.
I don't think termite itself can be ported to CL, and I don't think it
sports the important aspect of Erlang that you can send asynchronous
signals (i.e. kill threads at any moment).

Instead, I intend to implement a system that allows Erlang-style
thread-killing on top of CL, using a combination of fork and green
threads for selectable grain in thread-dependencies. I have started
working on it (have built green threads on top of arnesi:with-call/cc,
and some preliminary work on forking), but haven't invested enough
energy in it yet to complete the task.

Eventually, I would like a system that has user-declared hierarchies
of safe-points, as in my thesis, but that requires control over
code-generation for decent performance, and thus compiler support -
i.e. writing my own compiler or deeply subverting an existing one. I
still haven't really started on this one, and don't know which
compiler to subvert. Maybe the one from Movitz? or the code by Ian
Piumarta? PLT internals are some unworkable one-man thing, and SBCL
seems somewhat hard to subvert in such directions.

> But for a scientific workstation, the choice is really between Fedora,
> Gentoo, or Ubuntu/Lenny/Sid.
It shouldn't matter much, as we should write our code in standard
enough CL (or PLT Scheme, or Slate) to be bootstrappable from
semi-standard packages.

Bespin uses debian (soon to be Etch). I use debian lenny at home.
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