Gerbil – A meta-dialect of Scheme | Hacker News Reader

Gerbil – A meta-dialect of Scheme

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85 pointssnazz17 comments

I would appreciate support for non-emacs editors. I've yet to successfully set up emacs the way I want, both on arch and osx. It's a personal problem, I know, but its hard to work up the motivation to become fluent in emacs when I waste so much time getting the magical incantation of packages, libraries, and emacs versions all in sync and actually working properly.

With that said, I just might try again, as I've been wanting to add a scheme to my repertoire, and this looks quite nice!

Try https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

Seriously please do try Spacemacs -- setup is basically just a git clone, then start emacs, then (if desired) toggle stuff on/off in the .spacemacs file

Been there, done that. I dont recall exactly what went wrong, its been too long. I think part of it may have also been not knowing what came from spacemacs and what came native to emacs adding to the learning curve.

Setting spacemacs aside, other problems have largely been emacs itself. Something about the versions or dependency libraries available on linux mint and arch being incompatible with desired plugins, or installed plugins not activating or working.

Like I said, I might give it another shot, though given how comfortable I am with other options, I can't honestly say that I know what I would get out of it. Org-mode is uninteresting as I have no need for it, most other editors that I use have reasonable parentheses manipulation (or the fee keystrokes that would be saved with a shortcut arent a big deal). Other schemes and lisps I've tried have also had reasonable REPL integration as well.

Who knows, maybe this time around I'll find something to keep my interest. Does emacs have anything like VSCode's ability to run remotely in a docker container? That is something that definitely would be handy for working with gerbil, since I'm currently doing my side projects in osx

It's weird to me that there isn't good LSP support (that I know of) for any Lisp dialect. I know tooling gets more scarce in less-used languages, but still. I don't want to be stuck between a very complicated esoteric system and a second-class workflow.

Clojure is, I think, an exception here. Cursive / Intellij, Salza Liquid [1], VSCode (via calva), and more. I haven't done much clojure extensively, so I can't speak to parenthetical editing capabilities compared to emacs, but there it is.

I will say liquid looks really interesting, if I were interested in doing more clojure that is.

[1] https://github.com/mogenslund/liquid

So, as someone who has experimented with several scheme interpreters / dialects / etc, I'm seeing how this is another scheme, and generally it looks quite interesting in that regard, but I'm not seeing how it is a 'meta-dialect' and what exactly the 'post-modern' features are (or what either actually means)..

that said, the network / rpc / database facilities make this look like a good scripting scheme for microservices sorts of things

I think it's "meta" because it's built on top of Gambit. Some of the features (actor model, MOP) are uncommon in Schemes.

I'd be interested in a comparison of its integrated web framework to Awful from CHICKEN. I've used Awful and it was certainly not awful, but haven't tried Gerbil yet.

I'm in the process of trying it out. So far it's quite trivial for REST/CRUD, have been focusing on other stuff.

It's meta because it has a meta-object protocol.

If anyone wants to try it, I have a fairly recent Docker image up as insightful/ubuntu-gerbil.

Sources:

https://github.com/insightfulsystems/ubuntu-gerbil

(need to fix that pipeline, I know)

WoW! i totally love it the syntax sugar is beautiful. and seems to have good oo support, struct, protocols and http stack. It would be interesting to see some opengl examples though.

it advertises itself as an actor language and being distributed and concurrent to the core, but the actor documentation has nothing but “please document me!” messages. :(

"Post-modern" as in it questions grand narratives, such as Code Is Eating The World? /jk

#t is subjective

That is a succinct funny joke!

I think a meta-dialect is already plenty, so we can do without postmodern features in the title above.

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