[Larceny-users] Larceny - 2008

[William D Clinger]

Ray Racine wrote:
> Beyond the possibility of item #1, I doubt any of these are on the
> Larceny radar screen, not should they be, as the majority involve little
> to no compiler work.  But I'd really like to see #1 on the long term
> road map.

#1 (aka Grand Larceny) has been on Larceny's long term
road map for so long I'm ashamed to admit it.

With the understanding that we are talking long term now,
with no definite release dates...

> 0. An increased user base.  I'm working on this on #scheme.

Thank you!

> 1. SMP/Multicore/Native Threading...

Grand Larceny.

> 2. Concurrency Library - a la Erlang/Scala Actors and/or SML CML.

Grand Larceny would have something along these lines.

> 3. Zero penalty overhead, in fact, even enhanced compiler performance,
> from using libraries by taking advantage of the (let () ..)ness of
> libraries closing over identifiers, using limited inference, leveraging
> immutability etc.

You can expect those things to be phased in during 2008.

> 4. A more informative debugger.  I don't need a full disassembler, heck
> I don't know what I'd do with it.  I'm happy guy just walking the stack
> frames, with additional annotations that allow me to follow the
> back/stack-trace (manually is fine) to source code.  I know I called a
> procedure with only 2 args when it was expecting 3, but dag blast it,
> which one!

Larceny won't ever have a great debugger, but what you
described should be within our reach.

> 5. Additional introspective/reflective apis into libraries and the
> Larceny system.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

> 6. Better compiler error messages....

We should be able to improve those.

> 7. A Scheme IDE....

We're working on that for Common Larceny, and hope to port
at least some parts of it to native and Petit Larceny.

> 8. I'm not a big OO guy. In fact, it has only a single sweet spot
> (sufficiency and not a necessity) which is GUI Widget sets.  See #7.  A
> high performing CLOS system would be nice.  Port of MIT Scheme's SOS
> would be nice, don't need the full MOP.

That's one of our most urgent priorities.  Common Larceny
already contains a fragile, bug-ridden implementation of
a similar object system that I have to clean up for v0.97.

> 9. Modules....

This will wait until we see more acceptance of ERR5RS/R6RS
libraries.

> 10.  More libraries, libraries, libraries...

Amen!

> How did I forget.  64 bit compiler.  Yum Yum.

That will likely be my summer project.

Will