On 4/21/07, bryan rasmussen <address@hidden> wrote:
hi,
I was reading the complaints of various luminaries over in the scheme
hackers list as to why would one want to choose Chicken? I guess I
would want to choose Chicken because I don't want to get dirty with C,
but I want the portability of C.
C is portably not just across platforms it is portable across
languages and applications as platforms. Many languages allow
interaction with C in some way, probably because the languages need to
drop down to the C level to do some things.
if you want to write a driver or extension module for python you may
have to use Swig or distutils to get it to work with Python, that is
to say there are a number of specialized applications you need to have
working together.
The same thing if you were to bind erlang to C libraries
http://www.erlang-projects.org/Public/news/erlang_driver_toolki/view
Now a virtual appliance is a prepackaged virtual machine that has
everything setup that one needs to get started running a particular
suite of applications, tools on an OS or similar things:
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/
what about Virtual appliances that are setup up with not just Scheme,
Swig etc. but requisite tools and eggs to use Chicken for writing, say
as one example Erlang drivers? To do this for a good number of
scenarios, OS's etc. to demonstrate Chicken's portability as a tool
for writing C easily and efficiently?
I'm not understanding what you're getting at. The VMWare page seems to be about shipping your choice of OS to enterprise customers. If you're not doing enterprise development, I don't see how the concept applies, or has any kind of economy of scale.
I've wondered if it would make sense to ship a game with its own OS to consumers, so that I wouldn't have to be enslaved to Windows issues or whatever. But the reality is, I can't see consumers cranking up a DVD just to play a game on their PC. That's very MS-DOS era usability, running 1 program on your PC at a time, and consumers aren't going back. It would make more sense to do it on a console, where people are used to just plugging in a CD or DVD and having it work. I worry though that the boot times might be completely unacceptable. Modern console users just plug their game in and start playing, it's an instant entertainment sort of thing.
So the first question is, under what conditions does shipping an OS to a customer make any kind of sense? I don't think you've really answered this in your musings above. Perhaps you could elaborate.
The second question is, who's going to do all the support work for such a thing? People doing enterprise development are investing big bucks in their undertakings. Does such an effort make sense for you personally? It definitely doesn't make sense for the Chicken community. We are merely a small community of volunteers, working on whatever projects are of most benefit to us personally. The community resources for pursuing very abstract "work everywhere" infrastructure simply don't exist. I can't even get people to do modest amounts of bughunting for the Visual Studio 2005 Express compiler.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every