On 07/08/11 11:13, Denis Washington wrote:

> OK, this is getting somewhat off-topic, but I felt the need to reply.
>
> GUIs are not inherently unportable. In fact, if there were something
> like a portable FFI (which, e.g., Common Lisp has with CFFI), it would
> be no problem to write a wrapper for something like GTK+ or wxWindows
> that is portable among implementations (at least the one that don't run
> on non-C platforms such as .NET or the JVM) and base your app on that.
> So I don't see why portable applications should be necessarily "boring".

As you say, though, things like standard C FFIs can't be extended to
non-C platforms. It's possible to write a portable GUI library with
backends that are C FFI wrappers, or Swing for the JVM, and so on, but
it's an onerous task that nobody's really satisfactorily done yet... So
a portable GUI standard is possible, but has yet to emerge :-)

> To be honest, Scheme is one of the few languages I know in which you
> have to tie yourself so intimately with one single implementation to
> write any serious applications. I mean, how often do you write, say, a
> C++ implementation that only works with the Wacom C++ compiler? I find
> it a bit sad that there are such a wealth of Scheme implementations, but
> such little ground for actually sharing Scheme code, especially for
> things that need interaction with native libraries.

Yeah. I'm hoping for R7RS to improve the situation for *library code*,
so my personal focus has been on language-internal stuff like libraries
themselves, exceptions, parameters, and so on. I hope that WG2 will
improve the situation with standardising access to platform facilities
like the network!

>
> Regards,
> Denis Washington
>

ABS

--
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

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