Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Freja Nordsiek]

Not necessarily. Using bytevectors and SRFI-4 vectors works very well for some 
kinds of data. Just, they aren't the best for other kinds (in principle they 
can work with all data if one is one implements a heap or other custom memory 
management inside one). They can be made to work but are hard for some types of 
data, and if you are working with pointers inside them very easy to get a 
segfault (even python numpy, which has a lot of work done on it over many 
years, still has a fairly easy way to segfault it if one uses object dtype).


Freja Nordsiek

On July 16, 2017 12:31:37 PM GMT+02:00, Marko Rauhamaa <address@hidden> wrote:
>Freja Nordsiek <address@hidden>:
>
>> I checked the implementation of bytecectors and SRFI-4 in Guile and
>> they are definitely not scanned for pointers. But I would say hacking
>> them is not a good general solution for this problem. They are good
>> and natural data structures for large arrays of numerical data that
>> are standard signed/unsigned integers of various fixed sizes and IEEE
>> floating point numbers, or structures/unions of these types. Using
>> them for things other than that or strings/byte-arrays could be error
>> prone, messy, and performance poor.
>
>So no Scheme solution recommended then?
>
>
>Marko