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LambdaNative – Cross-platform mobile apps in Scheme

by landakram on 6/23/17, 3:33 PM with 36 comments

  • by winter_blue on 6/23/17, 8:36 PM

    It's a bit inaccurate of them to present the results of a 17-year old paper (published in 2000), as empirical evidence that development time in Scheme is shorter. These days there are plethora of language choices on the JVM, and if I were devloping a multi-platform app today, I would personally choose Kotlin along with the Intel Multi-OS Engine:https://software.intel.com/en-us/multi-os-engine

    Part of my motivation to prefer Kotlin over Clojure (the most popular LISP on the JVM langauge?) is that I am a huge proponent of static typing. Large programs written in statically typed languages are orders of magnitute more readable, more maintainable, easier to understand, and far less error-prone, than programs written in dynamically typed languages.

    The recent surge in popularity of dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc, had been a source of horror and frustration to me. It feels like a huge segment industry is throwing away decades of advancement made in programming language research, and instead of moving to languages with more advanced type systems, they're abandoning sound typing altogether (shudder).

  • by gerbilscheme on 6/24/17, 3:09 AM

    Gambit is a fantastic scheme system. The performance you get from it exceeds even SBCL in my limited use cases. Additionally, Gerbil Scheme (http://cons.io), built on Gambit, has expanded syntax like racket's #lang features for dsls. Several packages have also been create for it for most of the things I need.

  • by alekq on 6/23/17, 9:45 PM

    A recent example of cross-platform app/game made with LambdaNative: https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/6hng3q/i_developed_...

  • by kronos29296 on 6/23/17, 7:50 PM

    This project blew me away. I always thought Scheme was just interpreters and toy programs. Hope this succeeds in making scheme popular. Scheme and Lisps in general way too underrated.

  • by _delirium on 6/23/17, 7:28 PM

    Previous discussion, from about a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11192542

    And a paper (2013) giving some details and explaining their motivations: http://ecem.ece.ubc.ca/%7Ecpetersen/lambdanative_icfp13.pdf

  • by gliechtenstein on 6/23/17, 6:46 PM

    This looks awesome! I believe being able to express an entire app logic as data can be super powerful.

    BTW shameless plug: If you're interested in this type of ideas, please also check out Jasonette (an open source project I'm working on) Just like this project uses "list" to describe an app, Jasonette uses JSON to describe an app. https://www.jasonette.com

  • by desireco42 on 6/23/17, 7:21 PM

    I love it! This is awesome idea, now that I see it, I wonder why wouldn't Google just use it, if Apple will not, this makes total sense for mobile apps. Pair it with high performance native api, it can be winning ticket.

  • by githubber123 on 6/23/17, 8:52 PM

    I'd like to see someone code golf that calculator in javascript.

  • by baldfat on 6/23/17, 7:24 PM

    LOVE this project. My serious question is why wasn't this done in Racket as opposed to Scheme? Seems this would fit in Dr Racket wonderfully.