Vladimir Sedach

Have Emacs - Will Hack

November 28, 2011

Montréal Scheme/Lisp Users Group back in action

Topic: Lisp

After a long hiatus, the Montréal Scheme/Lisp Users Group (MSLUG) is back to regular meetings, with the latest one taking place November 24.

Marc Feeley gave two talks, the first presenting his experiences adapting the Gambit Scheme implementation into the Gambit REPL Scheme interpreter app for iOS (most of the difficulties seemed to revolve around the Apple app store screening process). (slides)

Then Marc showed and discussed a demo doing distributed computing using mobile, serialized continuations bouncing around Gambit instances on x86 Macs and ARM-based iPhones/iPods. The slides are well worth checking out, particularly for insight into how serialization of problematic objects like I/O streams/ports is done.

There is at least one Common Lisp project (cl-walker) that claims to be able to serialize continuations, and another library (Storable Functions) which claims to be able to serialize closures (from which you can get continuations with a CPS transformer). I have not tried either and to my knowledge there has not been any works done on mobile continuations for Common Lisp, or that much work for mobile code in Common Lisp in general.

The next MSLUG meeting is tentatively January 19th. I am scheduled to present a talk on Parenscript.