#schemelang — Public Fediverse posts

The challenge of writing portable Scheme code is that every implementation has myriad little idiosyncrasies. Today I discovered the #MITScheme tries to read #Emacs -style file header comments (for example ;; -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-) and this can cause the reader to crash for some reason. I am not sure if it is a bug or a feature, but it did throw me off for a whole day while I tried to figure out why MIT Scheme wouldn’t compile a library file.

I also happen to be hung-up on a bug in #Guile 3.0.11. It seems to me like the optimizer is emitting bad code, because I get a SEGFAULT on an expression that #Gauche has no trouble executing. I am still working on a bug report, and trying to figure out a work-around.

#tech #software #Scheme #Schemacs #SchemeLang #R7RS #Lisp #GuileScheme #GaucheScheme

The challenge of writing portable Scheme code is that every implementation has myriad little idiosyncrasies. Today I discovered the #MITScheme tries to read #Emacs -style file header comments (for example ;; -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-) and this can cause the reader to crash for some reason. I am not sure if it is a bug or a feature, but it did throw me off for a whole day while I tried to figure out why MIT Scheme wouldn’t compile a library file.

I also happen to be hung-up on a bug in #Guile 3.0.11. It seems to me like the optimizer is emitting bad code, because I get a SEGFAULT on an expression that #Gauche has no trouble executing. I am still working on a bug report, and trying to figure out a work-around.

#tech #software #Scheme #Schemacs #SchemeLang #R7RS #Lisp #GuileScheme #GaucheScheme

The challenge of writing portable Scheme code is that every implementation has myriad little idiosyncrasies. Today I discovered the #MITScheme tries to read #Emacs -style file header comments (for example ;; -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-) and this can cause the reader to crash for some reason. I am not sure if it is a bug or a feature, but it did throw me off for a whole day while I tried to figure out why MIT Scheme wouldn’t compile a library file.

I also happen to be hung-up on a bug in #Guile 3.0.11. It seems to me like the optimizer is emitting bad code, because I get a SEGFAULT on an expression that #Gauche has no trouble executing. I am still working on a bug report, and trying to figure out a work-around.

#tech #software #Scheme #Schemacs #SchemeLang #R7RS #Lisp #GuileScheme #GaucheScheme

The challenge of writing portable Scheme code is that every implementation has myriad little idiosyncrasies. Today I discovered the #MITScheme tries to read #Emacs -style file header comments (for example ;; -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-) and this can cause the reader to crash for some reason. I am not sure if it is a bug or a feature, but it did throw me off for a whole day while I tried to figure out why MIT Scheme wouldn’t compile a library file.

I also happen to be hung-up on a bug in #Guile 3.0.11. It seems to me like the optimizer is emitting bad code, because I get a SEGFAULT on an expression that #Gauche has no trouble executing. I am still working on a bug report, and trying to figure out a work-around.

#tech #software #Scheme #Schemacs #SchemeLang #R7RS #Lisp #GuileScheme #GaucheScheme

Just use a #ProgrammingLanguage that isn’t popular (e.g. #Haskell or some #Lisp dialect) to write your code, but publish human-readable intermediate form of that code in the public code repositories (e.g. the C programming language). Share the actual source code privately with trusted contributors in non-public branches, and require GPG signatures on actual contributions.

You could argue that not sharing source code is against the GPL, but the GPL does allow you to share the code as a hard copy printed on paper and sent over snail mail. Or you can just wait until the person asking is an actual human that you can trust not to use the source code for LLM training.

LLMs are unable to learn unpopular programming languages because they don’t have a sufficient corpus of training data to learn how to code it, so if your receive a contribution in C, thank the contributor but inform them that they will have to rewrite the contribution in your Lisp dialect before you can accept it.

#Scheme dialects like #Gambit , #Chicken , and #Bigloo would work well for this. So would a #CommonLisp implementation that translates to C such as #ECL . Although keep in mind that the idea is to use a less popular language, so you may have to further obscure these languages a little bit, but not in a way that would be difficult for humans. For example, using a macro system, you could use df instead of define, rename types of things like string? to utf8str?, use generic functions with mulitple dispatch so append will work on strings, lists, vectors, and bytevectors. Small tweaks like this might throw-off an LLM asked to write source code in Lisp.

#tech #software #LLMs #LLM #FOSS #FLOSS #OpenSource #SchemeLang #R7RS

I have been banging my head against #Gtk3 for the past 3 weeks and all progress has pretty much come to a stand-still. No matter how simple and straight-forward my GUI is, Gtk makes it simply impossible to get the layout correct. I am now convinced that programming my own layout algorithm from scratch and using the GtkLayout container (which lets you place widgets at arbitrary X,Y coordinates) is the only way to proceed at this point. It is soooo frustrating.

The #Gtk documentation is good, but not at all good enough. The people on the Gnome Discourse have been very kind and helpful, and I truly appreciate the engagement I have had there, but ultimately I am still not able to solve my problems.

I have decided I need find some way to keep making progress without postponing the release of the work I have done so far for an indeterminate length of time. So rather than work out all the bugs in this version before merging it to the main Git branch, what I will do instead is have the main program launch a debugger window. The debugger window will have all layout calculated in advance, and all widgets will be declared once and only once throughout the lifetime of the application to avoid the reference counting issues. Obviously the debugger GUI will be very rigid, but you will at least be able to edit files and run commands in a REPL within this debugger.

Then maybe I can merge the code I have written to the main Git branch, and people will at least be able to use it through the debugger. Maybe also I could use this debugger to help with writing my layout algorithm. Also, I need to get back to the Emacs Lisp interpreter, I haven’t worked on it in almost two months now.

#tech #software #Lisp #Emacs #EmacsLisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #R7RS

Quoting the memo:

The outgoing Steering Committee was elected in 2009 and successfully oversaw the production and ratification of the R7RS small language report until 2013. Unfortunately, during the protracted initial development of the R7RS large language after that, it fell dormant.

The current Scheme Working Group resolved in September 2025 to ask the Steering Commitee for a new election because it felt that after such long dormancy the outgoing Steering Committee was no longer able, as a group, to make and implement decisions effectively.

The Scheme standardization process charter says, ‘The Steering Committee itself shall establish procedures for replacing its members.’ The outgoing Steering Committee unanimously decided to delegate this task to the current Working Group. The Working Group has very closely modelled the procedure to be used this time on the procedure used last time.

The Working Group has written a statement to candidates and voters explaining what it hopes for in a new steering committee.

Lobste.rs thread

#tech #software #Scheme #SchemeLang #ProgrammingLanguage #R7RS #R7RSLarge #Lisp #FunctionalProgramming #Guile #GuileScheme #ChezScheme #ChickenScheme #GambitScheme #RacketLang #Racket

A preview of the next major #ChickenScheme version: "What to expect from CHICKEN 6": https://www.more-magic.net/posts/chicken-6.html #SchemeLang