Re: GNU and MzScheme's Internal design

[Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu>]

> From: "Ji-Yong D. Chung" <virtualcyber@erols.com>
> 
>     I needed something on a server to respond reasonably fast
> to a scripting request (XML processing request) from a client 
> application.  I suppose I could have implemented a Fortran interpreter
> (just a compiler would not have worked) for this --
> but I have not seen a working one, and it would have been 
> pain in the neck for me to find or write such a thing.
> On the other hand, Scheme interpreter was easy to write.
> 
>     I would have loved to use MzScheme (it certainly
> performed well enough), but I couldn't, for two reasons:
> 
> (1)  GNU licensing scheme -- as I was not sure if the 
> my app was to be a  GNU too, I could not really take that
> chance. 

PLT software uses the LGPL, which is considerably less restrictive than the
GPL.  Among other things, it doesn't prevent you from building a commercial
closed-source application which uses the LGPL'd code.  Therefore, I'm not
sure what you mean by "taking a chance".  Could you clarify?

> 
> (2) insufficient number of easily accessible 
> documentation of its internal designs and ideas
> (I am not putting MzScheme down, as this is
> standard practice with most open source libs)
>
>     When one incorporates other people's library,
> unless that library is well understood, the borrower
> ends up treating that library like a plutonium, because one cannot
> modify the borrowed source code with confidence,
> for the fear of introducing new bugs and problems.
>

Quite true, but I assume you've seen "Inside PLT Mzscheme" at

http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/doc/insidemz/index.htm

I'm personally extremely impressed with the quality of the PLT documentation.

>     If I were to use MzScheme for a serious programming
> project, I need to understand its subcomponents 
> thoroughly -- that basically means I have to single 
> step through most of its functions and understand exactly
> what it is doing.  That could take a while without
> somewhat detailed design documentation -- 
> which I could not find.
> 
>     It is actually easier to just write a simple Scheme
> interpreter that approximates MzScheme's performance.
> 

Well, good luck :-)  Brent Fulgham is building a version of AOLServer that
uses mzscheme as a scripting language, so you might want to ask him what
the status of that is.

Mike