Subject: Do we need a Scheme virtual machine?

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 08:04:47 +0300 (IDT)

Isn't Emacs enough for a lisp-based virtual machine?

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked] 
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From: Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 08:43:14 +0300 (IDT)

> Isn't Emacs enough for a lisp-based virtual machine?

If I were to go that route, I'd simply use Guile as a scheme virtual
machine. Why do I need a c-based editor library too?

But I think I'd go the Scheme48-anything useful + all UNIX syscalls + a
schemeish mmap based dynamic library.

--
Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com

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From: Omer Mussaev <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 13:54:40 +0300

> Isn't Emacs enough for a lisp-based virtual machine?

not really, since emacs is based on emacs-lisp, which:

does not support local variables properly
does not allow proper tail recursion optimization
does not allow proper tail call optimization
does not have continuations as first class objects
....

in short - emacs lisp can not be regarded as high performance
language.
To make it such, you"ll wind up with guile.

BTW: guile is not the speediest scheme thing I saw. I would opt
for scm, since it is really fast interperter.

On the other hand, when speaking of schemeOS, there are issues which
are not present in Linux, but shoud be considered.

More on that later.

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--
Omer Mussaev    051-308-214   mailto:[email-masked]
systems programmer, Mercury Interactive/RND/Conduct/core

---

From: Moshe Zadka <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 23:41:19 +0300 (IDT)

> for scm, since it is really fast interperter.

Do you have knowledge of comparisons between scm and scheme48? I'm
seriously debating here.

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 14:18:03 +0300 (IDT)

> Do you have knowledge of comparisons between scm and scheme48? I'm

Well, there's a rather new implementation of Scheme called QScheme, which
claims to be very fast. Check:

http://www.sof.ch/dan/qscheme/index-e.html

If you'd like to check the speed of Scheme, you should write some test
programs. Like computing the value of pi to the 100th digit (I have the
source code for that in C), or solving the  Hanoi towers up to the 10th
block.

In any case, there are benchmarks between QScheme, scm, and guile here:

http://www.sof.ch/dan/qscheme/bench.html

QScheme has some other goodies that should make it good for a basis for a
Scheme VM. Like ability to be an extension langauge or foreign function
calls.

I haven't tried it out but it looks nice on the surface.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
 
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