MSLUG Meetings http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/mslug-meetings-feed en MSLUG Meeting announcements Developing high-performance network servers in Lisp http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/30 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/30 This talk will cover techniques for developing high-performance network servers in Lisp, with examples and lessons from the TPD2, Antiweb, and the speaker's own soon-to-be-released Common Lisp HTTP servers. Topics covered will include techniques for efficient input handling and output generation, vectored IO, thread pool design, and asynchronous IO management using continuations and state machines. Mon, 17 Nov 2009 19:00:00 +0000 The Design of VLAM Compyle : a tower of languages from Python to C++ using Scheme http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/29 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/29 Marc-Antoine Desroches will give a presentation about the design choices made while building VLAM Compyle, a just-in-time compiler for Python.  Benefits and challenges associated with a language-based design will be discussed.

``VLAM Compyle makes it possible to combine the expressive power of dynamic programming languages with the high performance of the best C++ compilers by transforming python code into optimized dynamically linked libraries.''

http://www.vlam.ca/compyle

Hopefully, people from the Python community will join us, which should
make for fun and interesting discussions at the pub :)

Everybody is welcome, admission is free, pants are mandatory.
 Wed, 12 Mar 2009 19:00:00 +0000 Jazz Night http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/28 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/28

As some of you know, Guillaume Cartier has been working for the past 12 years on his Jazz Scheme system. It is a powerful and complete development environment for Scheme applications. You can read about it here: www.jazzscheme.org

A couple of years ago, he decided to port the whole Jazz kernel to Gambit-C Scheme and to eventually release Jazz under an Open Source License. With the near completion of X11 support, the time to do a full public release is coming very close.

In order to help spot and iron out the remaining issues for a full public release, Guillaume will be doing a "Closed Beta" release to the participants of the MSLUG. The release will take place at the MSLUG meeting on November 27th. You are encouraged to bring your own laptop, as Guillaume will walk us through the installation of Jazz and the creation of a simple application. Note that Jazz should run on Windows *and* on systems featuring an X11 server.

Thanks to Marc Feeley, WiFi Internet access will be available at the meeting, which should help with the whole process.

Once everybody is up and going with the system, we'll merrily go down the mountain to the pub and celebrate the release.

Everybody is welcome. Please spread the news around and invite friends and colleagues.

See you there!

Wed, 27 Nov 2008 19:00:00 +0000 Scheme for the Novice http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/27 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/27

This talk is intended as a tutorial on Scheme that will also expand on more advanced uses of the language and of the Gambit-C implementation of Scheme.

 Wed, 27 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0000 Beer and discussions http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/26 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/26 The next meeting of the MSLUG will take place as usual on a Wednesday, at Pub Ste-Elisabeth at 7pm.

We'll be upstairs, on the indoor terrace.

See you on Wednesday! Tue, 23 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0000 Commercial Users of Scheme and Lisp http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/25 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/25 Houman Zolfaghari : Using scheme in the industry: a possibly powerful but difficult choice

Having used scheme/lisp for more than 12 years in the industry for some large scale projects, I will talk a bout my experience and my latest considerations and conclusions.

Dominique Boucher : Scheme in the enterprise: pitfalls to avoid

In this short presentation, I will share my experience introducing Scheme in an industrial setting. I will mainly focus on how to avoid some common pitfalls.


Daniel Villeneuve & Alain Marcotte : Three goals, 2 companies, 1 ...

Overview of 3 utilizations of scheme in two different companies where scheme is part of delivered products. A glance at the architecture and environment for those products.

Guillaume Cartier : Anyone called for the doctor?

Overview of the Chyma Scheduler, a rule-based scheduler for hospitals written for IsaiX Technologies using JazzScheme under its new open source license.

I will also discuss how it has been possible for us on various occasions to help clients with Lisp based solutions when the hurt was considerable and Lisp was seen as the only doctor with potent enough medicine. Tue, 05 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0000 Hop and ContextL http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/24 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/24 The October meeting will take place during the OOPSLA 2007 conference. For this special event, the MSLUG invited two well-known speakers: Manuel Serrano and Pascal Costanza. Don't miss this exceptional event!

Where: UQAM, 100 Sherbrooke West, Room SU-1550
When: October 22nd, 2007 at 7h30PM


Manuel Serrano, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis

Manuel Serrano holds a Ph.D. degree from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), France, and works at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a research director. Most of his research activities are based, or use, the functional programming language Scheme. He is well-known for his highly-optimizing Scheme compiler, Bigloo. Manuel Serrano served on several international conferences: ICFP, JFLA, Scheme workshops, and more.

Title: Programming Multimedia Applications on the Web with HOP

Hop is a language dedicated to programming reactive and dynamic applications for the web, such as web agendas, web galleries, web mail clients, etc. In this presentation, we highlight the linguistic novelties introduced by Hop and its execution environment by describing Hop's user libraries, its extensions to the HTML-based standards, and its execution platform, the Hop web broker. The presentation will focus on presenting the development on multimedia applications with Hop. There will be several live demonstrations during the presentation.


Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Pascal Costanza has a Ph.D. degree from the University of Bonn, Germany, and works as a research assistant at the Programming Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His past involvements include specification and implementation of the languages Gilgul and Lava, and the design and application of the JMangler framework for load-time transformation of Java class files. He has also implemented ContextL, the first programming language extension for Context-oriented Programming based on CLOS, and aspect-oriented extensions for CLOS. He has also co-organized numerous workshops on Unanticipated Software Evolution, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Object Technology for Ambient Intelligence, Lisp, and redefinition of computing.

Title: Context-oriented Programming in ContextL

There is an increased need for context-aware applications that can dynamically adjust their behavior to the context of their use. Two years ago, we have introduced ContextL, our first programming language extension that explicitly supports Context-oriented Programming (COP), based on the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). In COP, programs consist of partial class and method definitions that can be selected and combined at runtime as needed. Employing runtime adaptations to class and method definitions, COP does not only allow expressing context-aware behavior, but encourages continually adjusting behavior
of programs according to their context.

In my presentation, I will show and discuss the following.
  • The basic language constructs of ContextL.
  • The development of non-trivial examples.
  • The current state of the art in COP: language extensions, example applications and support for the various stages in software development.
  • Future work: promising next steps that several researchers in our own groups and elsewhere are currently undertaking.
 Sun, 22 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0000 SchemeCamp 1 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/23 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/23 This meeting will be our first "SchemeCamp", an event based on the popular BarCamp/DemoCamp events. Each presentation lasts about 15-20 minutes.

The following presentations are scheduled this week:

Christopher Diggins - A translator from Scheme to a statically-typed functional stack-based language.

Étienne Bergeron - A "JIT Synthesizer", i.e. a runtime system that produces FPGA configurations instead of machine code.

Adrien Piérard - Adrien will talk about his Master's Thesis (details to come).

David St-Hilaire - Design and implementation of a Tetris game. Tue, 29 Aug 2007 19:00:00 +0000 Snow by example http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/22 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/22 Snow is a general framework for developing and distributing portable Scheme packages. Currently Snow packages can be run on a dozen of the most popular Scheme implementations including Bigloo, Chez, Chicken, Gambit, Gauche, Guile, Kawa, MzScheme, Scheme48, SCM, Scsh, and STklos. The repository contains packages for networking, cryptography, data compression, parsing, data structures, etc. In this talk I will present the main features of the Snow framework and explain briefly how the framework is implemented. Several examples will be given. Wed, 24 May 2007 19:00:00 +0000 How (and why) I implemented the MSLUG website in Erlang http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/21 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/21 In this talk, I will present how I implemented the MSLUG website in Erlang. We will see how, in about 1K lines of Erlang code, one can implement a high-performance, fully-dynamic website with RSS feeds, database support, and more. The talk will cover the basic aspects of Erlang (its syntax, the read-eval-print loop, etc.) as well as more advanced features: Mnesia, the concurrent distributed database, the high performance web server Yaws, and OTP.

Note that this will be a very informal meeting, with lots of code. The goal is to show why I consider Erlang to be mostly a member of the Lisp family, even with its Prolog-like syntax ;-)

Dominique Boucher is a senior developer and consultant at Nü Echo, a company that specializes in the development of speech-enabled applications for large call centers. Wed, 19 Apr 2007 19:00:00 +0000