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by jpolitz
3222 days ago
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Cool to see Whalesong up here; it's worth pointing out the incredible effort put into making this really work for Racket, _including_ support for continuations. That is, you can compile a Racket program that uses call/cc and friends to JavaScript. This is huge because with powerful control operators like call/cc, you can simulate pre-emptive multithreading within a browser tab. This gives the runtime: - The ability to simulate synchronous functions backed by asynchronous library calls (e.g. apparently make a synchronous request to a URL from the program's point of view, but have it backed by an AJAX request)
- The ability to add a pause and/or stop button to an IDE within a browser tab, even if the program goes into an infinite loop In fact, work on Whalesong (and a few earlier prototypes) more or less run the Racket-using parts of www.wescheme.org which 10s of thousands of students use each year. Most x-to-JS implementations don't have this level of feature richness; Doppio and GopherJS are two that have similar levels of execution control. I worked in the same office as dyoo while he was implementing Whalesong about 5 years ago, and learned a ton from him and from the system. Pyret and code.pyret.org directly built on some of the code for the "framework to program the web in functional event-driven style" in reactors (https://www.pyret.org/docs/latest/reactors.html). Whalesong's APIs for programmatically saving and restoring the stack inspired the ones we use in Pyret, as well. |
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