Comment by veqq
20 days ago
It's fascinating how much development's occurring in Guile recently. Unfortunately, a lot seems to be ex-Racketers moving over. The splitting of community effort's sad (particularly as Guile e.g. greatly lags Racket performance or lacks nice libraries like Gauche).
> particularly as Guile e.g. greatly lags Racket performance
Huh. This has not been my experience, rather the other way around.
I do see a whole heap of benchmarks that contradict it, so I probably should put in some effort to find out why, or if I'm just plain wrong... But at a guess? Guile doesn't have Racket's startup time penalty, and most of what I do is IO bound - and Guile's IO story is better than Racket's.
https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/
For the onlookers, this bunch of microbenchmarks suggests Racket is faster than Guile, but the fastest is Chez (which Racket uses as a substrate).
Yeah, know of it. But no IO, filesystem, network or otherwise. Never found it altogether great as an actual benchmark other than for raw computation.
Not bad at comparing compilers and optimisation. Great for checking R7RS compliance. Not what I'd trust to make decisions with.
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Guile, being a bytecode VM with JIT currently, loses to Chez/Racket overall but it's honestly quite fast. I can make games that run at a smooth 60fps with infrequent GC pauses. Plenty of room to grow but Guile isn't slow by any means. I've never been a Gauche user but Guile has lots of nice libraries these days.
I don't really follow Racket, but I recall that few years ago one apparently fairly significant contributor within their community wrote a blog post about Racket having a Missing Stair problem involving another even more significant (possibly foundational) contributor.
I'm a complete outsider, cannot find that blog post any more, and also just not invested in the language at all, so I'm hesitant draw conclusions about the validity of any of the accusations that were thrown back and forth at the time, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's inevitable that the community will end up being split after an event like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
https://alexalejandre.com/notes/criticisms-of-racket/ summarizes some such stories
if it's Felleisen, then i'm surprised. i've met him on a conference for a couple of days about a decade ago, and my memory is of a nononsense guy with whom our vision of programming resonated a lot.
i was coming from the CL side of the isle, i hadn't known his work prior to that.
I'm happy for Guile to be getting more attention, but wouldn't write off Racket. A few quick thoughts...
* The recent Guile work on WASM is promising. (Note also Jens Axel Soegaard's recent work on WASM with a Racket-related compiler.)
* Racket's rehosting atop Chez seems like a good idea, and I'd guess that the Racket internals are now easier to work with than Guile's.
* Racket has done a lot of great work, and is a nice platform for people who can choose their tools without worrying about employability keywords for their resume. It made some missteps for broader adoption when it had a chance, and several of the most prominent industry practitioner contributors left.
* Racket still has the best metaprogramming facilities, AFAIK. But even more important than `syntax-parse` and `#lang`, one thing I'd really like from Guile and other Schemes is to support Racket's module system.
(I really like the ability to define Racket submodules inline, in fragments, for things like embedded unit tests <https://docs.racket-lang.org/overeasy/> and embedded API docs <https://docs.racket-lang.org/mcfly/>.)
(I also wanted to play with Racket's module system for PL research compilers: having early compiler implementation for a new language first expand into Scheme code, and then later (with submodules) also do native/VM code generation, while keeping the option to still expand to Scheme code (for better development tools, or for when changing the language). For example, imagine targeting a microcontroller or a GPU.)
* Right now, any Scheme is for people who don't have to do techbro/brogrammer interviews. The field has been in a bad place for awhile, professionalism-wise, and the troubled economy (and post-ZIRP disruption of the familiar VC growth investment scams) and the push to "AI" robo-plagiarism (albeit with attendant new investment scams) are suddenly making the field worse for ICs.
> I'd guess that the Racket internals are now easier to work with than Guile's
Maybe, I couldn't say, but I find Chez's source code very cryptic and hard to read. More so than any other Scheme implementation.
> write off Racket
I wrote that Guile "greatly lags" Racket.
I didn't know there was a schism in Racket. Is this about the CS vs BC backend? I thought that was water under the bridge.
> greatly lags Racket performance
This is a different implementation of Guile, though. Has Hoot (on, say, V8) been benchmarked?