Summary of lispvan August 2007 meeting: JazzScheme
Friday, August 10, 2007
Guillaume Cartier gave a demo of
JazzScheme at the
August meeting of
lispvan. The presentation focused on both JazzScheme (a lisp language
based on Scheme but influenced by other languages) and Jedi (a
programming IDE developed in JazzScheme).
JazzScheme "feels" familiar to both CL programmers and Scheme
programmers (although it is neither) as it incorporates features from
multiple languages. In addition, it currently supports a mixture of object systems. For people
coming from a Java background, there is an object system that looks
very similar to the Java one; however, JazzScheme also supports a more
CLOS-like object system as well and a programmer can mix-and-match the
approaches.
Although JazzScheme is currently a Win32-only product, it
was recently open-sourced and Guillaume is
porting it to Linux and Mac
OS X by re-writing the Win32-specific C++ core in Scheme (currently,
Gambit) and using the
Cairo graphics library (for graphical rendering). In addition, he is transitioning JazzScheme from a proprietary
lisp dialect to actually being an R5RS-compliant Scheme.
Jedi is the IDE used to develop JazzScheme code (although it also
currently supports Scheme, CL, C++, and Java as well) and is the largest
non-commercial application developed in JazzScheme. It has a look and
feel similar to
Eclipse but with influences from Emacs, MCL, and the Lisp
Machine. It was fun to see how you could dynamically
introspect/debug/change UI components of the editor while you were
editing code in the editor! Once the multi-platform port has been completed, Jedi should
provide a nice alternative for Scheme or CL programmers who don't want
to use Emacs.
Guillaume plans to have the cross-platform version of JazzScheme/Jedi
available (as an early beta) in the beginning of 2008. It will be
interesting to see how this develops and I'll definitely be following
his progress. If you're interested in learning more about JazzScheme,
you can browse the
JazzScheme web site,
download the Win32 version of the code, and join the
developers mailing
list.
Thanks to Guillaume Cartier for an interesting (and fun) demo.
