Manuel Serrano

Understanding memory allocation of scheme programs

Memory is the performance bottleneck of modern architectures. Keeping memory consumption as low as possible enables fast and unobtrusive applications. But it is not easy to estimate the memory use of programs implemented in functional languages, due to both the complex translations of some high level constructs, and the use of automatic memory managers.To help understand memory allocation behavior of Scheme programs, we have designed two complementary tools. The first one reports on frequency of allocation, heap configurations and on memory reclamation. The second tracks down memory leaks1. We have applied these tools to our Scheme compiler, the largest Scheme program we have been developing. This has allowed us to drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed during its bootstrap process, without requiring much development time.Development tools will be neglected unless they are both conveniently accessible and easy to use. In order to avoid this pitfall, we have carefully designed the user interface of these two tools. Their integration into a real programming environment for Scheme is detailed in the paper.

Bee: an integrated development environment for the Scheme programming language

The Bee is an integrated development environment for the Scheme programming language. It provides the user with a connection between Scheme and the C programming language, a symbolic debugger, a profiler, an interpreter, an optimizing compiler that delivers stand alone executables, a source file browser, a project manager, user libraries and online documentation. This article details the facilities of the Bee, its user interface, and presents an overview of the implementation of its main components.

Programming graphical user interfaces with Scheme

This paper presents Biglook, a widget library for an extended version of the Scheme programming language. It uses classes of a Clos-like object layer to represent widgets and Scheme closures to handle graphical events. Combining functional and object-oriented programming styles yields an original application programming interface that advocates a strict separation between the implementation of the graphical interfaces and the user-associated commands, enabling compact source code. The Biglook implementation separates the Scheme programming interface and the native back-end. This permits different ports for Biglook. The current version uses GTK+ and Swing graphical toolkits, while the previous release used Tk.