Guile – Scheme Implementation Supporting R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS Standard and SRFI | Hacker News Reader

Guile – Scheme Implementation Supporting R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS Standard and SRFI

gnu.org

24 pointsdragonsh10 comments

Hey dragonsh — you left a comment on my submission a while back about e-commerce data models and it inspired us to write a post about nosql and hybrid e-commerce data models. Here is the nosql one (https://resources.fabric.inc/blog/nosql-ecommerce-data-model). The hybrid one is coming soon. I will delete this comment soon as it is not relevant to this thread.

One thing I find fascinating is that it feels like Common Lisp, Racket and Clojure are talked about a lot, but from the top of my head I would not be able to name everyday software or tools written in any of them.

Meanwhile I rarely encounter discussions and talk about Guile while at the same time seeing it "everywhere" (Guix, embedded scripting in GDB, Gnucash).

This is just my personal feeling though.

Guile is the 'official extension language' for GNU projects; i.e. for embedding into C programs, for scripting, macros, writing plugins, etc. This gives it a boost in popularity (similar to how JS got a boost from being the 'official extension language' of the Web; although on a massively different scale!)

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#Applications I've personally used StumpWM and ACL2; and Cyc is a rather prominent project.

One notable application that's written in Racket is Hacker News! (It's written in 'Arc', which is implemented using Racket).

Oh yeah I think I should add that it was certainly not my intention to downplay the more popular lisps or their applications!

Not sure at which extent they still use Common Lisp, but syscog used to be a Lisp shop for their transport and trafic management software.

https://www.siscog.pt/en/

https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/scheduling/siscog.lh...

Google also became a Lisp shop when they acquired ITA

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/technology/02google.html

https://franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory...

Apple, Walmart, Baresquare, Nubank use Clojure

https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2015/6/30/walmart-runs-clojur...

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200184362/apple-media-p...

https://www.baresquare.com

https://nubank.com.br/en/

I think that this is a situation where the former are all server-side tools used beneath the surface to power that SaaS used by millions every day, while the latter is visible in a small handful of tools used only by the tiny fraction of the population that would visit sites like HN and even then Guile is used (statistically speaking) by no one.

For me, the idea of scheme is the idea of a few well-chosen primitives that compose into higher abstractions. Guile does this really well, in my opinion. You can get a decent superficial overview of the implementation in a week, and the IRC channel are really helpful with the parts that are not standard scheme.

I would be interested in a list of (used/popular?) applications that are written in Scheme.

I get the impression that a lot of Scheme code is in projects that never get published. I can easily name 5+ Scheme implementations that I heard of, but I don't know any prominent examples of software implemented in Scheme.

TeXmacs is an impressive project spanning several decades:

https://www.texmacs.org

It uses Guile as its scripting language and documents created within TeXmacs are represented as Scheme programs.

In addition to providing a LaTeX-quality WYSIWYG editor experience for scientific documents, TeXmacs can also be used as a computer algebra front-end for packages like Mathics, which provides an open-source implementation of the Wolfram programming language used in Mathematica:

https://mathics.org/

The Shepard init system[0] for Guix and most of the Guix plumbing are written in Guile Scheme. There's also Guile Emacs.

[0]https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/

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