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Why Arc? Why MzScheme?
5 points by cmars232 5948 days ago | 6 comments
Since I'll be looking into MzScheme now, can anyone explain at a high level how Arc adds value and differentiates itself from MzScheme? Why would I want to use Arc as a skin on top of it, instead of just developing in Scheme?

Also, if anyone's ever done it, what are the drawbacks to deploying an MzScheme-based application?

I'm not asking to be a troll, I'm genuinely interested in Arc (and now MzScheme as a result) and new platforms in general, but I don't see this being addressed anywhere.



2 points by elibarzilay 5948 days ago | link

Arc is more than a "skin" -- it is a different language, which is compiled to mzscheme.

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8 points by pg 5948 days ago | link

Yes. Architecturally Arc is like a skin on MzScheme, in the sense that we made MzScheme do as much of the work as we could. Semantically it's not especially like Scheme.

So you should just judge Arc for itself. Its main disadvantages over other Lisp dialects are that it's slow and lacks libraries. Its main advantage is that programs come out shorter.

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1 point by sarosh 5948 days ago | link

Not sure if this is the proper thread for you to address this, but I'm curious as to whether you think there would be in value to something like Arc -> C/Java/? for libraries/frameworks/speed

(which would (theoretically) be just a kludge/hack on Bigloo http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/)

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4 points by Zak 5948 days ago | link

RTFAQ: http://paulgraham.com/arcfaq.html

Arc is intended to not be attached to any other language or VM. That's not to say you couldn't implement your own Arc runtime on top of a language of your choice. In fact, since there are already Schemes that run on top of both C and Java, you could do so simply by porting the Scheme parts to an appropriate Scheme. It's under 1000 lines of Scheme.

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2 points by sarosh 5947 days ago | link

Thanks for the heads up (didn't know about the FAQ). The porting of the relevant Scheme option seems interesting; I'll have to check it out

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2 points by troelskn 5948 days ago | link

You might find this interesting: http://www.untyped.com/downloads/icfp068-welsh.pdf

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