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Still under development?
2 points by Twoflower 3976 days ago | 2 comments
Is arc still under development? According to wikipedia, the last stable release was 4 years ago.

Also, I don't quite understand what it means when it was said that arc should be a "hackable" language. What does that mean exactly? Are other lisps such as sbcl and scheme NOT hackable?



6 points by akkartik 3976 days ago | link

I think it's 'meta hackable' in that you can choose what 'hackable' means :) Some people may choose "last release 4 years ago" to mean it's dead. I choose to think 'stable release' doesn't apply to arc. Even PG's versions have the disclaimer "future releases can break anything", which doesn't seem very stable. So I and a few others choose to "break anything" of our own accord :)

'Hackable' isn't black or white, but a question of priorities. SBCL and Racket care about keeping the implementation hackable, but have other higher priorities: it should provide a stable interface that doesn't break user code, it should provide a compiler, it should run programs really fast, it should help teams of people work on large projects, etc. With arc, hackability is the #1 priority. It's a pretty good platform for experimenting with language features, or at least a pretty good forum for discussing language features you build on any platform. But it's not the ideal place if you just want features and don't care how they're built.

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2 points by Twoflower 3973 days ago | link

Thanks! :D

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