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

[Felix Winkelmann]

From: Oleg Kolosov <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 23:08:23 +0400

> On 08/18/14 20:41, Mario Domenech Goulart wrote:
>> Hi Felix and all,
>> 
>> On Mon, 18 Aug 2014 16:53:22 +0200 (CEST) Felix Winkelmann <address@hidden> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm not sure how to go on with the CR-related changes. 
>>>
>>> I wonder whether it isn't better to postpone releasing these changes,
>>> by creating development branches and switch in one step to CHICKEN 5,
>>> which would have a number of advantages over doing all that in a
>>> piecewise fashion:
>>>
>> 
>> Not related with removing units from the core, but since we are talking
>> about CHICKEN 5, shouldn't we consider discussing some polemic topics
>> like the support for Unicode and bignums in core?  Those are limitations
>> that recently lead to some ugly hacks (some examples in [1]) and bugs
>> (e.g., [2]).
>> 
> 
> Or we can declare that CHICKEN 5 != 5.0 and go on with the breakage. I'm
> concerned that trying to fit everything into 5.0 will never finish -
> there could be lengthy discussions about proposed features and no
> action. Personally, I think that modularizing the core is of utmost
> importance now, fixing eggs and adding features could be postponed to
> some later point releases.

Very true - I fully agree with that. I think we have enough of core
support for R7RS right now and the general direction is to remove
stuff (i.e. move to eggs) instead of adding anything. We also should
postpone further clean ups to a later point. 

Adding bignums + utf8 will also be much easier with a smaller and
and restructured core system, of course.

(this all assumes we don't go mad while ripping everything apart...)


felix