Re: Worrying development

[Roland Orre]

On Fri, 2004-01-16 at 12:19, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
>    From: Roland Orre <address@hidden>
>    Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 10:41:05 +0100
> 
>    to be able to utilize facilities which are only available there.
> 
> which facilities are these?  (could you be more specific?)

The statement was not very specific and what I was thinking about was
not very specific, more based upon the general expectation that a new
version contains new functions (usually... now it was the opposite).

The main reason, however, for me to continue with 1.7 after 1.6 is that
as I've understood from Mikael Djurfeldt goops and the corresponding
matrix handling are only fully supported in 1.7. There is also real
pthreads support, which I've however not utilized yet, this is more
like a nice future potential. The only thing which I'll be dependent
on is goops support.

Another nice thing with guile 1.7, as I've understood, is that the
garbage collector now is utilizing Robert Strand's (Bobby Beach)
old idea to have the garbage collection bits separated from the
actual tags. This gives potentials for e.g. background garbage
collection as a parallell process. (I was by the way working with
Robert Strand at ASEA in the beginning of the 80ies when he invented
this idea).

Of course we also have the GMP support in 1.7, even though this is
nice, I won't use it myself very much. Mostly I'm doing number
crunching, statistical analysis and data base handling.

        Best regards
        Roland