Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sritchie 1640 days ago
I've been engaged in a 1.5 year long (so far) project to port the entirety of GJS's "scmutils" package over to Clojure, and the erratic behavior of MIT Scheme over Rosetta has been a pain I've consigned myself to for months. I keep an old machine handy when I need to test functions that can't work on the M1.

I am SO HAPPY to see this work! Major timesaver for me and anyone looking to run the executable versions of Functional Differential Geometry[1] and Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics[2] in the original language.

[0] https://github.com/sicmutils/sicmutils [1] https://github.com/sicmutils/fdg-book [2] https://github.com/sicmutils/sicm-book

1 comments

I have to ask, how far along is this project? Is it good enough to run all of the examples in the books? I have run into the issue where the provided compiled version of scmutils from GJS' website doesn't run on recent versions of MIT Scheme (version 11 and up) and there's not much info on compiling it yourself.
It is good enough! Almost all code forms from the book live in the tests (see the FDG directory[0], for example), and there are a few nice environments like Nextjournal[1] where everything from the books works in the browser.

The Clojure port is quite fast, faster than the original for all benchmarks GJS has sent me, and more fleshed out. (That will change, as I've been pushing bugfixes and performance improvements back upstream as I go, as a meager gift to GJS for making this huge, amazing library in the first place.)

I actually wrote to GJS this morning asking for instructions on how to compile the original "scmutils", since I have the same problem. He responded saying he'll get back to me this afternoon, so I'll post here once I have details.

If you are still interested in getting the books going with MIT-Scheme, I put a decent amount of work into the exercises using the original codebase here[2], including a dockerized version of mit-scheme[3] and the scmutils package[4] that might be useful.

- [0] https://github.com/sicmutils/sicmutils/tree/main/test/sicmut...

- [1] https://nextjournal.com/try/samritchie/sicmutils/

- [2] https://github.com/sicmutils/sicm-exercises

- [3] https://hub.docker.com/r/sritchie/mit-scheme

- [4] https://hub.docker.com/r/sritchie/mechanics

Awesome resources, thank you!