Comment by dang

5 months ago

> Arc was implemented on top of Racket

Originally on MzScheme, then later PLT Scheme. It was ported to Racket by the great kogir, IIRC.

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dang

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sctb  5 months ago

I think MzScheme is just the core (non-GUI) part of PLT Scheme, which was renamed to Racket.

Also, I believe pg started implementing Arc on Scheme48 based on mailing list activity at the time. I've always been curious about the switch to PLT!

  • neilv  5 months ago

    That might've been more a reflection on PLT than on Scheme48 (which also had some really smart people on it).

    As some point, when I was writing a lot of basic ecosystem code that I tested on many Scheme implementations, PLT Scheme (including MzScheme, DrScheme, and a few other big pieces), by Matthias Felleisen and grad students at Rice, appeared to be getting more resources and making more progress than most.

    So I moved to be PLT-first rather than portable-Scheme-first, and a bunch of other people did, too.

    After Matthias moved to Northeastern, and students graduated on to their own well-deserved professorships and other roles, some of them continued to contribute to what was soon called Racket (rather than PLT Scheme). With Matthew Flatt still doing highly-skilled and highly-productive systems programming on the core.

    Eventually, no matter how good their intentions and how solid their platform for production work, the research-programs-first mindset of Racket started to be a barrier to commercial uptake. They should've brought in at least one of the prolific non-professor Racketeers into the hooded circle of elders a lot sooner, and listened to that person.

    One of the weaknesses of Racket for some purposes was lack of easy multi-core. The Racket "Places" concept (implementation?) didn't really solve it. You can work around it creatively, as I did for important production (e.g., the familiar Web interview load-balancing across application servers, and also offloading some tasks to distinct host processes on the same server), but using host multi-core more easily is much nicer.

    As a language, I've used both Racket and CL professionally, and I prefer a certain style of Racket. But CL also has more than its share of top programmers, and CL also has some very powerful and solid tools, including strengths over Racket.

kragen  5 months ago

Aren't MzScheme, PLT Scheme, and Racket the same thing?