Re: Typed Guile?

[Noah Lavine]

Hello,

Here are a few random thoughts: I had a project a little while ago to
try to get some of the benefit of static typing in Guile. It never
went very far, but actually some of the same machinery is coming to
the surface in the compiler anyway. I think it could be taken farther,
to the point that Guile really would have the benefits of a
statically-typed language.

However, what's in Guile right now is not that, and it might take some
work to get it there. So no, Guile is not statically typed right now.

Performance is another interesting question. Of the things you named,
only Guile doesn't compile to native code (yet), so that's going to be
a performance hit. However, performance is relative. Since you didn't
list C or Fortran as choices, you don't care about having extreme
control over what your machine is doing; I don't know enough about
your goals to know whether Guile will give you the performance you
want. But Guile can be extended in C, so you have the option to go as
fast as you want.

That's the best I can do without knowing more about your library.

Thanks,
Noah Lavine

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 10:06 PM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The first part of this message may look irrelevent, but you'll
> understand why I decided to start this way.
>
> I'm going to write a library.
>
> Here is the list of things I care about (from the most important to
> the least important):
>
>  - Strict type system;
>  - Wide community;
>  - Performance.
>
> There are several candidates:
>
>  - Haskell;
>  - Typed Racket;
>  - Typed Clojure*.
>
> Which one should I choose?
>
> (Please don't answer right now.)
>
> I've already tried to ask TR people:
>
> "Typed Racket is designed for Racket. One day Guile will have a Typed
> Guile companion, and Chez Scheme may have a Typed Chez companion but
> until then TR is for Racket." [1]
>
> Is it this bad? Do we really need Typed Guile?
>
> Can we somehow adapt the static code to achieve its features in Guile?
>
> I'm really concerned about code reuse. It's time to stop reinventing
> the wheel.
>
> My writing skills are not very great...
> So I'm going to summarize the above:
>
>  1. What language should I choose for my library?
>  2. Do we need Typed Guile?
>
> * I know nothing about TC's type system, but it's a possible candidate.
>
> [1] http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2012-September/054037.html
>     (This is not the first message on this thread.)
>
>
>
>