Re[2]: [Chicken-users] Questions on changing Chicken runtime and some other stuff

[Sergey Khorev]

fw> > 2. I saw there were some issues on Win32, especially with MinGW. I wonder
fw> > whether they have been resolved or not, so I can put my hands on them.
fw> Yes, please. Brandon is currently wrestling with CMake, but perhaps
fw> you can try the current snapshot yourself and report any build problems.
fw> Some issues should be fixed by now, but I can't reproduce it since
fw> I don't have a mingw system at hand.

I prefer plain vanilla configure/make way rather than yet another supa build 
tool :)
MinGW problems on this way are really minor and I've just fixed them. Although 
I'm planning to add support for pcre and regex packages on MinGW before 
submitting the fix.

It seems makefile.vc has been dropped in favour of CMake? I tried to use that 
tool but nmake failed with some weird error. Are there any additional 
instructions on using it besides README, especially what setting I must change, 
what I can and what I can't. Because I have to admit I changed something before 
getting errors :)

fw> > 3. Currently I'm thinking about another application of Chicken. I have a
fw> > project in some language other than C (its name isn't a secret, just 
doesn't
fw> > matter for now and I haven't even started implementing the project :)
fw> > Definitely it will require a scripting language. I'd like to embed Chicken
fw> > rather than to implement Yet Another Scheme in the host language, 
especially
fw> > call/cc, hygienic macros and optional compilation of the Scheme code.
fw> > The host language has FFI interface so embedding shouldn't be a problem,
fw> > but I don't like an idea having two separate garbage collectors in one
fw> > process. So I was wondering how difficult would be a task replacing 
Chicken
fw> > runtime system? My idea is to keep current runtime interface but 
substitute
fw> > the body with calls to the host language other than just C.
fw> > Has anyone looked into this or even tried to implement?
fw> Hm. So you mean putting the high-level stuff (essentially the Scheme part,
fw> modulo any FFI C code) on top of a runtime-system like, say, OCaml?
fw> Interesting problem... Definitely work intensive...

I think it could be compared with reimplementing Chicken from scratch so I 
meant something different :)
My idea was to redirect low-level allocation and gc routines with calls to the 
host language.
This shall lead to some performance penalty but it's still better than writing 
my own Scheme.
After quick glance at "Cheney on the M.T.A." it seems that using C stack is a 
critical part so
probably Chicken runtime can't be easily migrated. But it seems Chicken gc is 
much smarter than
Boehm's "search all the heap for references to all of the heap object" so 
probably I should give it a try as is.
Thanks.