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First Report on the Pre-Scheme Restoration
by Andrew Whatson — Thu 10 October 2024 It's been over 3 months since kicking off the Pre-Scheme Restoration project, so it's well and truly time for a progress update! I'm pleased to report that the bulk of the port to R7RS has been completed, with approximately 75% of the codebase successfully loading in 3 different R7RS-compatible Scheme implementations (Chibi, Sagittarius, and Guile) and 100% of the codebase running via a new R7RS compatibility layer for Scheme 48. The libraries which haven't yet been ported all directly interface with the Scheme expander front-end, and replacing that with a portable expander is the next major focus of the project.
Any change breaking compatibility with the original platform would prevent the test from being run, and leave us in the painful situation of only being able to detect and debug errors after everything has been ported. Scsh is built on top of Scheme 48, so is capable of loading the original Pre-Scheme compiler and performing introspection, while also providing better support for dealing with the filesystem and external processes. These utility libraries separate the core of the Pre-Scheme compiler from the differences of the target Scheme implementations, and provide a convenient point for test coverage.
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