Re: systas

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

Yep, systas is a branch off Guile.

Tom Lord was the maintainer of Guile; he ended up leaving the
maintainership post because of differences with Stallman, and with a
number of the more active volunteers.  One of the major problems was
that he was unresponsive to users.  (Not that I've been so great about
that either.)

After he left, he worked on Systas for a while, did some cool things,
and then seemed to abandon it for other pursuits.

One of the things he did with Systas which I really liked was hooking
up a C preprocessor and parser to Scheme, so you could then use Scheme
to do all kinds of flow analysis --- find unmatched DEFER/ALLOW_INTS
calls, etc.  I think that has tons of potential.


My opinion, for what it's worth:

Tom has written some brilliant code (Rx has some problems, but it's a
beautiful design), and I would like to have him contributing to Guile,
but I've had a hard time working with him.  For example, it's
difficult to get him to finish something up enough to make it useable
by ordinary people.  He tends to write up the core of an application,
in some genuinely groovy way, and then assume that because the
remaining details (like a comprehensible API, or a configure/Makefile
system that works) are technically trivial, they're not important.  So
a lot of his stuff has received a much more narrow audience than it
should, given its technical merit.  At this point, I am pretty much
waiting for one of his projects to take off on its own before I get
involved.