ryukafalz · 16 hours ago

Presumably to run in the browser? Guile Scheme is great for native programs but you need Hoot to run it in a browser.

wallstop · 16 hours ago

I think the second sentence of the article covers that pretty simply? To run it in the browser with wasm?

> One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot.

Jtsummers · 16 hours ago

> Why not just use Scheme directly, what's the benefit of porting to Hoot?

Scheme is not a thing you use directly, you have to select an implementation. Hoot is one such implementation (targeting execution on WASM).

veqq · 11 hours ago

> Why not just use Scheme directly, what's the benefit of porting to Hoot?

In other terms: Why not just use C directly, why use gcc?

Diogenesian · 7 hours ago

Did you click the link? https://gracefulliberty.com/physics/

They are making little web applets demonstrating the physics concepts. You obviously can't do this in pure R6RS/etc., you need to pick some implementation that either has JS/WASM FFI or something built in. Likewise if they were doing this as a desktop application, etc. Pure Scheme can model the physics and return the correct numbers, but you need something more for graphics and interactivity.

paroneayea · 10 hours ago

Hi! Yes, Spritely started Hoot to get Spritely's programs, built on top of Spritely Goblins, to a wider audience. And the network protocol we use / co-designed is OCapN, which is indeed in the family of CapTP languages: https://ocapn.org/

The good news is there are four fairly mature implementations (two Scheme implementations across Guile and Racket, a Dart implementation, a Javascript implementation) and one upcoming one (a Zig implementation). We have a whole specification and test suite and even an implementation guide!

The experience Jessica Tallon and I had with doing standardization work on ActivityPub led us to decide to take a different path when starting the group for OCapN: instead of bringing the topic of what we wanted to achieve to a standards group, we decided to start a "pre-standards group" which, effectively, works pretty much exactly like a standards group but does all the heavy lifting of making sure we have a decent spec, interoperability, a test suite, etc before bringing to a formal standards group (or really moving outside of "stealth mode": we haven't advertised OCapN too much to make sure we had a design that was fairly solid between a few core implementations before trying to push for wider adoption, which can quickly ossify a spec since making changes past that point requires getting the whole ecosystem to change). We've mostly achieved that now, and there's an open debate about whether, should we really bring this to a formal standards group at all?

Regardless, OCapN is pretty awesome, and we'll probably revamp the website and etc pretty soon to make it clearer that it's ready for more projects to start implementing!

rao-v · 7 hours ago

“Spritely has been going strong for many years. I suppose Hoot was created to make Goblins [0] available to a broader public via wasm, as a reference implementation of CapTP specification”

Has extreme Curtains for Zoosha (https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha) energy

davexunit · 7 hours ago

The OCapN group is actively working on a milestone for 1.0, the first interop target. It's getting close! https://github.com/ocapn/ocapn/milestone/2