Re: Squeak and PLT Scheme

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. wrote:

> Ah, but don't you think PLT Scheme folks would love to be able to access
> the cross-platform desktop, Morphic graphics, and other exotic Squeak
> libraries?

Yeah, definitely.

Unfortunately, porting the PLT Scheme language to another platform is
a non-trivial effort.  The PLT Scheme language is quite large,
technically hairy, and would take a bit of time to reimplement (with
some support necessary from the run-time system, particularly the
garbage collector).  So Scheme-in-Squeak proofs of concept are all
well and cute, and one might even grow them into a reasonably-sized
Scheme system, but it's doubtful they would get very close to the
functionality and linguistics that PLT currently provides.

Now if there were an easy way to integrate the existing PLT binaries
into Squeak, that would be another matter.  But I presume that
wouldn't give ready access to the Squeak objects.  For that matter,
you might as well run a Squeak session as a thread alongside PLT and
reuse it that way, right?

Shriram