Thank you Matthias for the historical information, it was interesting to learn that a porting project was sponsored by Microsoft in .NET's early days. Were any papers describing the efforts published?
Porting Racket to .NET definitely is ambitious and as you have said, it seems unlikely .NET has evolved enough to make it a feasible proposition. My plan is to load the CLR into Racket's process as a separate foreign library and interact with it through a suitable interface. It's easy to load and call basic .NET managed functions using Racket's ffi library, it only takes three or four lines of code to accomplish a basic Hello, .NET World program. But an interop layer needs to be built to get any useful mileage out of it. So far my current design idea is to create proxy objects on Racket's side which forward calls to actual .NET objects but otherwise behave like standard Racket objects. We'll see how well that works. I will be happy to report on my progress. On Monday, January 16, 2017 at 10:08:17 AM UTC-5, Matthias Felleisen wrote: > MS asked us (mostly NEU) to investigate a port of Racket (then PLT Scheme) to > .Net some 15 years ago. (They supported the 4-year project with a generous > financial donation.) In the end, we had to admit defeat. Racket’s GUI > framework (e.g, event spaces), its mapping to the control stack (continuation > marks), and a few other niceties that we really enjoy (but could live > without) got in the way. > > Since then, both Racket and .Net have evolved, but I am afraid, not enough to > make a full-fledged port easy. > > Now, if you can live with separate Racket and .Net processes that communicate > via a COM or ActiveX-like interface, that might be doable. We do have COM > packages and have used them extensively. As far as I know, nothing like that > exists. > > Please continue to report on your efforts — Matthias > -- 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.
