Re: Scheme in the browser: A Hoot of a tale

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> writes:

> Hello Christine,

Hello Zelphir!

> I saw a post earlier on Mastodon and already opened it in my
> browser. Haven't got the time to really look at it yet.
>
> What is a Wireworld canvas? Is that a specific library, that interacts
> with canvas in the browser?

Ah!  Wireworld is just a kind of cellular automata (like Conway's Game
of Life) that we really like to use for showing off projects.  It
actually has nothing to do with Webassembly:

  http://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html

So what we're showing in the blogpost is an implementation of wireworld
where all the logic is happening in Scheme.  The rendering of that is
some custom Javascript.  You could expose more of the primitives to
Scheme and have more of the rendering happen in Scheme, but we decided
there were various reasons (including having most of the instructions
being familiar Scheme primitives including bytevector manipulation) to
have Scheme manipulate just the data part.

> Can Guile Hoot be used to make interactive websites, or is it so far
> only for canvas?

It can!  It'll become easier over time as more interfaces are exposed,
right now you have to wire up stuff manually via the FFI interface, but
you should be able to do anything you could do in Javascript in Scheme
instead using Hoot.

> Anyway, I think I need to play with this thing soon, and try some
> examples, as this sounds awesome!

Yay!  Let us know what you make!

> Best regards, Zelphir