Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes

[Alan Post]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 05:06:54PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 04:53:22PM +0200, Felix Winkelmann wrote:
> > - I don't know how this is handled with henrietta - do we need a
> >   separate CGI script running for this? It seems so, so the
> >   core-branch will need to have different download URLs in
> >   setup.defaults.
> 
> Perhaps, I'm not sure about that.  The release-info files don't have
> a way to indicate CHICKEN version either.  This needs some extra
> attention, so that repositories can support multiple CHICKEN versions.
> 
> > All this is mainly to safe time - keeping up backward-compatibility
> > hacks (wrapper-eggs, hacks in setup.defaults, etc.) just needs more
> > work and time and we haven't much of that, considering that we are
> > just a handful of part-time maintainers.
> 
> Yeah, we're pretty thinly spread right now.
> 
> I think calling this CHICKEN 5 may be a good idea.  I don't know for
> sure though: adding backwards compatibility may actually be easier
> in this situation.  Ripping out the SRFIs from core should be pretty
> simple, but it does require updating all the eggs.  And of course
> there's shitloads of eggs that are unmaintained, which will break
> and never get fixed.  So all in all, starting over might be easiest.
> 
> I'd love to hear from some of the people using CHICKEN in their business
> or for other Serious Projects (Kristian? Ivan? Andy?) how painful this
> would be for them.
> 

I used Chicken Scheme to bootstrap my company.  As of a few months
ago, I am no longer running any scheme code, it has been ported to
either C or Python.  Using Chicken for rapid prototyping was extremely
successful, I hope to have the opportunity to do so again.

I am still maintaining my eggs, and will be happy to do so through
this transition--one problem I ran in to prototyping, which frankly
surprised me--was hitting code- & infrastructure-related scalability
limitations in Chicken.  I'm happy see the effort above as a result.

The last major feature I added to my PEG parser was utf-8 support,
at Mario's request (and some years ago).  What worked best for me
there was a scheduled hackathon--IIRC I actually became unavailable
the Saturday it was scheduled, but finished my work on Sunday.

I don't think these changes impact any of my eggs to that degree--
though some of my dependencies will likely be affected.

-a
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