[pypy-dev] scheme interpreter [status report]

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Jakub,

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 02:35:20PM +0200, Jakub Gustak wrote:
> This is last scheme status report during SoC. So I will sum things up
> in the end.

Thanks for the good work you did during the summer!  The result looks
good to me, even with the missing features, but we'd really need a
Scheme guy to guide us from now on, if we want to make the interpreter
more usable.

> > I'd rather would like to think about how to throw continuations more
> > generally, and not have to implement continue_tr for every W_Callable,
> > than implementing capture differently.
> 
> No progress in this direction.
> Still every W_Callable to be continuations friendly has to use eval_cf
> instead of eval and must implement continue_tr method.
> 
> > Or maybe try totally different approach e.g write every call in CPS,
> > but it probably would require way too much changes right now.
> 
> Nor here.

Indeed, the current approach allows impressive-looking tests to pass,
but the code is quite verbose and inefficient.  We can start thinking at
some point about using the stackless and/or GC-based cloning operations
of RPython as a more orthogonal alternative, but that's an involved
topic.

> What's next?
> I will probably mysteriously disappear and became grave-digger or
> hermit. Never touch computer again and live happily ever after ;-).

If you do, then farewell!  In the event that you're interested to
continue, though (:-), here are in summary some possible future
directions:

* get some Scheme people interested in the project, try to run real
  Scheme projects

* implement more of the missing features

* think how to do continuations with stackless or GC-based cloning

* also, we could try to integrate pypy/lang/scheme and pypy/interpreter
  in one of the many possible ways, to offer a combined Python+Scheme
  environment...


A bientot,

Armin.