IIRC, this was a high performance scheme developed at Indiana University that was closed source for a long time.
Good on Cisco for open sourcing it.
I'm interested to hear what regular scheme programmers feel about this news.
Good on Cisco for open sourcing it.
I'm interested to hear what regular scheme programmers feel about this news.
On the other hand, there's an intellectual idea that for many companies, existing software should perhaps be seen as a liability in double entry accounting due to it's need for ongoing maintenance, upgrades, potential for catastrophic failure, and the cost associated with alterations for new business processes.
Companies offload some of those costs by open sourcing and allowing developers to happily "give back" to their bottom line.
On a longer timeline, hiring developers experienced in the technology from the open source community saves on the cost of training them for a proprietary code base.
Ideally, the open source community develops new features, identifies and patchs bugs, writes tests and libraries, etc. adding value realized by the company's paying customers. In the meantime the company still can devote staff to its business priorities and ignore those of the larger community: e.g. no `map` in go-lang and no `react new myapp` at the CLI for React.
To put it another way, why would a business open source code for anything other than business reasons?
The part where Cisco open sourced it is a bit unusual, but it's not uncommon for people to close source and sell systems they create during college or grad school and continue to use them in research.
Also, does Gambit not support native threads? That's surprising considering Marc Feeley did quite a bit of research on multiprocessing in Scheme, and he wrote the SRFI for threads.
The racket/place library provides support for performance improvement through parallelism with the place form. The place form creates a place, which is effectively a new Racket instance that can run in parallel to other places, including the initial place. The full power of the Racket language is available at each place, but places can communicate only through message passing—using the place-channel-put and place-channel-get functions on a limited set of values—which helps ensure the safety and independence of parallel computations.
Compare to current Guile, where the documentation says sharing a hash table without using a mutex will not corrupt memory, but probably won't give you the results you desire.