2 min read

Arctic Repository for Chez Scheme and others

Hello everyone,

As you may or may not know, I've been working on releasing Descot version 1 for some time. The main thing that has held me back is that I wasn't happy with the state of the library dependencies on which Descot relies. My previous Chez Scheme libraries needed to be ported over to R6RS, and because some projects, such as the portable SRFI project have come up to do much of the work I used to do, I have restructured my libraries to handle this.

Additionally, I have been trying to document the code that I have written more clearly, at least at a source code level, and have managed to do this across almost all of my miscellaneous libraries. I also hope to make most of my libraries fairly portable, and yet suitable for optimized execution in Chez Scheme. This has not quite reached maturity, yet, but I am working on it.

The latest hassle has been the development of a sockets library that didn't make you cringe with every fiber of your body. Now, my sockets library is moving towards a fully portable (or very trivial to port) set of libraries that interact together. I have removed the need for external stub files in the base library, and enabled non-blocking operations. At the moment, the non-blocking support is there, but you can't do much with it because I have not built the concurrent infrastructure on top of it. This release of the Arctic Repository makes the basic tools visible, but doesn't provide the high-level interface for it.

It does however, bring me to the point where I can release Descot version 1 for use. Once that is release, I'll be making the Arctic Repository available for search and retreival via the Descot web client on Sacrideo.

For now, though, I am just pleased to announce the availability of the first version of the Arctic Repository, which is available over Monotone revision control:

Branch: us.sacrideo.arcrepo
Server: mtn.sacrideo.us

Or, via gopher:

<gopher://gopher.sacrideo.us/1arcrepo/>

[Incidently, the gopher server is also itself written in Scheme, and available for review. It's very small and light, check it out!]

The Arctic Repository includes my port of the SRFI libraries to Chez Scheme, and it is designed for you to just drop the whole thing into a directory and have a working R6RS source search path.

Please send me questions and comments, as I continue to develop these libraries and this repository.

Be on the lookout for Descot V1 soon!

Aaron W. Hsu
arcfide@sacrideo.us
<http://www.sacrideo.us>