Inside of Sagittarius: Library system

I am not sure whether somebody is interested in this topic or not. However if there is someone who is hesitating to use Sagittarius because he/she does not know about inside. (Well, I just wanted to write something about Sagittarius in English, sorry)

The reason why I am writing this article is Sagittarius has a little bit different library system comparing with Ypsilon and mosh. (Sorry, I don't know about other implementation) Those two implementations does not have real library system, as far as I understood it has more like just alpha-conversion. So you can not operate or explicitly call any library with it. On Sagittarius, however, libraries are also a first class object. So you can actually do something with it. (I have no intention to make its APIs public, though). Because of this, Sagittarius has sort of namespace. (The same symbol can be bind to different values in different libraries).

What is the good things of it? Unfortunately, I can only say one good thing with it which you can re-define existing value somewhere in the library somebody wrote. So you can even patch the libraries which is written in C. Well, this is actually not so secure, however it is very convenient for debugging. (I used this behaviour to debug macro expansion.)

How is it implemented? It is actually really simple. The VM has library table which is created in Scheme or C and hold it to make sure no duplicated library exists. And library itself has a hashtable and some meta information. The hashtable's key is symbol and value is gloc. Gloc is sort of handle for bindings.

What is the *bad* thing of it? Well, I don't like to write this answer but every implementation have good/bad things and user must know it. Because of this library behaviour, Sagittarius can not have explicit macro expansion phase, so all for import keyword will be ignored. And because of this, (could be because of my insufficient skill), Sagittarius' syntax-case can not compromise a few R6RS requirements.

Sagittarius is still under developing however it has already a lot of useful libraries (maybe not documented yet...). If you like the idea and want to try R6RS implementation, why don't you try it?