Re: [Texmacs-dev] Disastrous boot time for new versions

[Leo]

On Wednesday March 05 2003 06:14, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> [snip]
> Do you know of more efficient implementations,
> which can also be used of extension languages?


Well, comparing scheme implementations is a very subjective matter and
also a very flammable topic.

In my humble opinion, MzScheme
http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/mzscheme/ is the most complete,
best documented and very actively supported implementation. It has
been around for quite some time and many people are using it. MzScheme
has nice FFI very well suited for writing extensions. Moreover, SWIG
officially supports mzscheme as one of its interface languages
(http://www.swig.org/). Mzscheme is R5RS compliant and comes with
module system, namespaces, OO, neat resource managment (custodians),
units, hygienic macros etc. Old style define-macro is also supported
for backwards compatibility. Very good documentation is an important
strength. MzScheme is being developed by somputer scientists
originally at the Rice University, TX, but now in Brown, North Eastern
Universities, University of Chicago, Univ. of Uta, etc. These guys are
writing scientific papers presumably with math formulas, trees, data
structures, etc. They could be interested in TeXmacs per se and might
help with the port:-)

As a second choice I would pick Scheme48 (or 'scsh' derived from it).
Scheme48 is a clean, small footprint Virtual Machine scheme
implementation. Nice design, quite fast. Very good support for
C-language extensions, Unfortunately not very actively maintained and
the documentation is poor. Nice module system and namespaces.

As for the guile, I will be diplomatic... and say nothing:-)


--Leo--