I guess I also have some concerns about the move to Chez, and largely for the same reasons:
* the Chez community is very small, at least when looking at the chez-scheme Google Group and Github activity. I am glad that I'm not the only one who noticed that. * the "maintainability" angle is questionable. I read all the reports and watched the presentation on YouTube, but all I found can be summarized as "Matthews opinion is that it will be more maintainable", while his opinion carries a lot of weight, it remains an opinion. Time will tell if Racket-on-Chez will actually be more maintainable. BTW, in my professional career I have seen a few large ode re-writes whose only benefit was to be "improved maintainability", without a clear definition of what that means. After the company spending a lot of time and money, this maintainability improvement did not materialize... based on that experience, I remain cautious -- sorry, I have been burnt to many times :-) * performance wise, it is clear to me by now, that the best I can hope for is for overall performance to remain largely the same when Racket 8.0? is released. In the current snapshot, the overall performance is worse. There is a separate google-groups thread about this, and I will try to help out on this, mostly by providing test cases. Based on what I have read and seen, my best understanding of Racket-on-Chez is that Racket as a language research platform, will probably benefit from this move and Racket as a teaching platform will not be affected either way. What that means for software development using Racket, remains to be seen. I apologize for the negative message... Alex. On Tuesday, February 5, 2019 at 9:01:20 PM UTC+8, Paulo Matos wrote: > > 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. 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