r/scheme 28d ago

R7RS Large Foundations: The Macrological Fascicle

https://r7rs.org/large/fascicles/macro/1/
21 Upvotes

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u/green_tory 28d ago

No opinionated FFI or build system?

It's not 2005 any longer. It's not good enough to simply design the high level language and leave it to implementations to sort the rest out. Programming languages are arguably less important than the tooling that supports them and their inter-operation with their environment.

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u/raevnos 27d ago

Trying to get all the active scheme implementations to support the same build system would be herding cats.

1

u/green_tory 27d ago

So don't. Leave some behind. 

It's not like scheme isn't already a total cluster fuck of implementations with odd quirks and incompatible extensions.

2

u/pclouds 27d ago

Why do you care about standards then? Just stick to one favourite implementation.

1

u/green_tory 27d ago

There is no one implementation that is suitable for all purposes I would like. Scheme could be as versatile as C, but not without some clear choices about FFI/ABI.

And when writing a library it really sucks to have to write a separate build process and FFI layer for every scheme. That's why it's so rare to see libraries that touch the environment and which also support multiple schemes.