On 6 Mar 2008, at 2:08 am, Ivan Raikov wrote:
Well, I think modifying or rewriting the garbage collector would be quite a lot of work for one summer, for someone who is presumably not familiar with the Chicken internals. The rest I agree with. MPI is one such multi-process model, and although it is often criticized for its communication overhead, I would really like to see some examples outside of scientific computing where this overhead really matters.
I wrote an efficient shared-memory lock-free queue system for a client once. They own the copyright, but I would happily mentor a student to build a somewhat more general and portable (this was specific to a few platforms) version of it in C and wrap it in chicken for lightweight interprocess goodness :-) I'm also keen on a proper library/module system, though. I'd like to be able to use multiple macro systems in the same source file, for a start. So something where chicken itself has a notion of a macro environment, and macro systems just register closures in an alist or whatever that (define-syntax ...) dispatches on to convert whatever the user supplies into a closure that rewrites syntax objects, then when the macro is invoked, that closure can be applied to perform the rewrite. Then the module system needs to know that there are two environments - values and syntax - to expose from modules and import into places, and all should be well. Surely? In fact, I'm so keen on a module system that knows about macros and lets me use multiple macro systems seamlessly, I was considering that as soon as I have some money spare (soon... soon... please God let me be out of debt soon...) I'd offer a bounty for whoever did it, as my near future points to more of an excess of money than time!
-Ivan
ABS -- Alaric Snell-Pym Work: http://www.snell-systems.co.uk/ Play: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ Blog: http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/?author=4 _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users