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- Hacker News
- Unrelated but Where is the ‘Sjamaan’ coming from? Ctrl+f doesn’t give any results. Not familiar with the Chicken/Scheme nomenclature but gives me the yuck’s (most if not all self declared shamans I met were total creeps)by thenthenthen
- Thanks for another great interview, veqq!
> What do those Lisp books lack?
> it doesn’t go very deeply into e.g. garbage collection and data representation.
> I like to blog about cool techniques that are undiscussed nowadays.
> For example implementing weak references and how to GC them efficiently.
I had the same complaints about the books! They're always so high level. Stuff like garbage collection is simply taken for granted. In a real lisp, it's a core part of the virtual machine.
The blog posts about the chicken garbage collector and data representation are excellent. I really want to read about how chicken's continuations are compiled, hope to see an article there about it someday.
I too have taken up blogging in order to fill those gaps.
> Other stuff I rarely see discussed is how to do FFI and cross-module optimizations
Yeah. Those subjects are deeply interesting but I've never been able to find much material about them.
Wingolog has a post about cross-module partial evaluation in guile.
https://www.wingolog.org/archives/2021/05/13/cross-module-in...
The partial evaluator cannot penetrate foreign functions, which prevents optimizations. It's an argument against FFIs!
> The biggest positive I see right now is the push for digital sovereignty.
> I sincerely hope this will change how people deploy tech, maybe in a more mindful manner.
> But vested interests and inertia will be hard to overcome and really bum me out.
Always nice to find more people who care! If you find a way to avoid feeling bummed out, please share. Things only seem to get more difficult for us...