Question: What is the main addition of Gerbil besides the 'Objective Language'

[bentxt]

Hi,
I've invested some time in order to find some info on what Gerbil from Gambit. Which features bring Gerbil on the the table besides the 'Objective Language'. As an absolute newcomer what impresses me is the number of really useful libraries I really would like to use. But then I will use a language not compatible to regular scheme. So I really have a hard time find anything, I mean like a list or some bullet points about what exactly Gerbil adds to Gambit.
This is a genuine question and not meant to be a dismissive or rhetoric. Gerbil looks great!

[vyzo]

Hello there,

There are many things that Gerbil brings to the table over plain Gambit -- it is a really modern LISP in the general sense -- and it takes nothing away from the excellent system Marc has built. (ok, we take away define-macro coz it is really a broken abstraction when you have hygiene all the way to the core. You can still defsyntax it though :)

Obviously, the objective parts of the language are very important, deeply integrated, and offer some very nice facilities: mop, classes, interfaces, dotted notation, generics, and so on. There has been significant work on the MOP in this release cycle, and many niceties will come to the v0.18.2 release, which is soon.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The macro and module system really are state of the art, and bring racket-like capabilities in a production, systems language for the first time. There is extensive metaproramming and custom language support, which makes writing libraries and large programs much more pleasant.

You've already mentioned the standard library, if you want to compete for mind share with mainstream languages like go and python, you really need to have an excellent standard library. And that we continuously work on.

And inside the standard library are hiding the actors. The actor system is quite advanced and makes writing distributed applications a joy. And it will get better during the v0.19 release cycle, check the milestone for related issues.

Besides that we also have some excellent tools: the testing tool, the httpd server (in master, coming in v0.18.2), actor ensemble management, and so on.

I think if you start reading some more of the code (the core language and the stdlib sources), you'll get the whole picture and understand how hard it would be to do those things in plain Scheme.

[metaleap]

There's so much real-world stuff packed into the std batteries, it keeps blowing my mind (as a fellow newcomer =) ... I see HTML & XML & JSON covered, HTTP clienting and (apparently) serving, a freakin' Postgres driver, JSON-RPC, RegEx, crypto, Protobuf, MIME, OS stuff beyond file IO & stdio — this lang really looks like a disconcertingly underhyped & undernoticed powerhouse to me.