Uhoh. Author of the post here. You know, when a post leaves its target audience, it can really make all the difference, huh? Last week I had a post on HN's frontpage and it was aimed at a general audience, it was an introductory topic (an intro to Scheme, without assumptions of involvement in that community). This time it's a post of mine I wrote off the cuff talking to a specific audience about a specific topic (specifically, me musing out loud about a project that would be interesting to the Guile community, to the Guile community). And that's fairly reflective in the replies here.
- Common Lisp is the only real lisp and anyone who's not using it reinvented it badly? Check.
- Questioning what is "systems programming" and yes I actually already did that in the post itself, it's a large portion of the post's text? Check.
- "It really ought to be in Rust because Rust is awesome?" Check.
The point of this post is, to the Guile community, "This would be an interesting thing for us to explore, here's what I've been loosely thinking about exploring it... what do you think? Anyone else excited to talk about this with me?" (It turns out, within that community: yes.) It's not hating on Common Lisp, it's not saying that existing lisps aren't already "systems languages" (I agreed on that in the post), and no I'm not aiming for this to be Rust because we have Rust and you can use Rust and that's cool!
And the other point of the post is: this is a hilarious name, "Guile Steel"... "Guile" + "Guy L. Steele" + "close to the metal". And also, PreScheme is a pretty cool thing that's been underexplored outside of Scheme48 and hey maybe we should think about whether that's a cool direction we should modernize on!
So anyway, if you feel annoyed because this isn't targeting Your Favorite Thing, that's cool... it isn't! You're super welcome to read the post, just know who the audience is, following the above. :)
May I suggest looking into Lokko Scheme[1]? It's a R6RS Scheme capable of booting in bare metal, even has a small OS available that you can boot up in QEMU, it even runs Doom! It's a great project, check it out.
There is actually already a Scheme interpreter implemented in Rust (https://github.com/mattwparas/steel) which has the same name for the exact reasons you stated.
- Common Lisp is the only real lisp and anyone who's not using it reinvented it badly? Check.
- Questioning what is "systems programming" and yes I actually already did that in the post itself, it's a large portion of the post's text? Check.
- "It really ought to be in Rust because Rust is awesome?" Check.
The point of this post is, to the Guile community, "This would be an interesting thing for us to explore, here's what I've been loosely thinking about exploring it... what do you think? Anyone else excited to talk about this with me?" (It turns out, within that community: yes.) It's not hating on Common Lisp, it's not saying that existing lisps aren't already "systems languages" (I agreed on that in the post), and no I'm not aiming for this to be Rust because we have Rust and you can use Rust and that's cool!
And the other point of the post is: this is a hilarious name, "Guile Steel"... "Guile" + "Guy L. Steele" + "close to the metal". And also, PreScheme is a pretty cool thing that's been underexplored outside of Scheme48 and hey maybe we should think about whether that's a cool direction we should modernize on!
So anyway, if you feel annoyed because this isn't targeting Your Favorite Thing, that's cool... it isn't! You're super welcome to read the post, just know who the audience is, following the above. :)