mattparas

Thanks! I'll trying plugging this in

I learned to code primarily through school - I had the privilege of studying at Northwestern where a lot of the Racket people teach, so my first programming class was in Racket. I have worked through some of SICP and How to Design Programs. After Racket I learned some C, C++, and C#. Then taught myself python just independently doing some projects, ended up back taking a few classes in Racket, then one in Agda that got me down the programming language rabbit hole. Took a class in Rust and that got me working on Steel.

I haven't _directly_ used scheme professionally except for some steel scripts for automating some work flows and some racket programs for spark query plan analysis. I'd like to work in scheme more in my professional work, but for now I'm quite happy just working on it for fun.

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to either join the discord and ask questions there if you want a more chat based place, or open a discussion on github if you'd like to learn more. I have it on my TODO list to set up a matrix chat, just haven't gotten around to it - so apologies for having discord as the only chatroom.

At least for me, there is a certain appeal in building the world. With scheme you get a very small set of functionality, but you use that to implement the rest of the language, and build abstractions on top of abstractions. Seeing how the whole system can be built from a small set of functionality is pretty cool, and also very satisfying. There is a talk from Andy Wingo, one of the maintainers of Guile, where he describes working on Guile as akin to tending to a garden, and I think its an apt comparison. Something about it feels very organic and personal, which is part of the appeal.

The syntax itself doesn't _really_ matter, it just makes it easy to do so - functions and syntax visually look the same, so it makes it easy to build.

Its not for everyone, but I think its worth exploring for a little bit. Similarly I think its worth really learning any language just a bit, if not to just expand your tool kit. The parenthesis do disappear at a certain point and you learn to read it, but if its not your thing that is fine.

Ah yes I remember seeing that when it was posted on HN - I think Steel predated that post by a few years :)

All of the work done by the guile folks is incredible, I wouldn't mind the name clash at all if there is a Guile steel that comes about.

Originally started it as a school project, which then during the pandemic morphed into something to work on while cooped up. It is really a passion project, working on it is fun! There are some interesting design things I wanted to explore, like how to get good performance out of safe Rust, using unrolled linked lists or vlists instead of naive linked lists, using contracts, etc.

Chibi is an impressive scheme implementation, and it will take a long time before Steel can hit the same level of compliance as Chibi. There is not a Chibi equivalent in native Rust that I am aware of. There are other embedded scripting languages for Rust that are pleasant - but no schemes of the maturity of Chibi. So in that regard, I'm hoping to offer a compelling scheme in native Rust to make integration with Rust applications relatively easy and painless.

I also don't have a particularly strong need to be 100% completely compliant with the scheme specs. The plan is to have compatibility layers so that portable scheme code can be used, however there are things about scheme that I think Racket (for example) improved on, and I'd like to explore that as well as much as I can.

Not at all! I agree it is a useful feature, I'd be curious how much it is necessary if not using any mutation, but the best way for me to find out is to try it out :)

Thank you - I appreciate the kind words :)

Yep - you can write standalone steel code without interacting with Rust at all, just interacting with the interpreter. I've done the first few days of the advent of code in Steel without needing to touch any Rust. Now, I will say that Steel has gotten visibility faster than I've been able to keep up with, so you might find a native function missing, or something that you would like to use that isn't implemented yet - at which point you either need to implement it yourself or open up an issue for someone to get to :)

I'll make a tracking issue for it - new GC work is fun! I'll do some research, I have on my back log to integrate Steel into Bevy or some other Rust game engine, would give me a reason to make some fun GCs

Yes, I don't have a link handy but I based it off the Phil Bagwell paper

At the moment I only have 1 SRFI package, and its just to check against compatibility :) - my plan is to wrap the SRFI packages with friendly names and just include the metadata in the package spec so someone searching for it can find it easily.