A great MSLUG meeting

Yesterday's MSLUG meeting was a true success. About 25 people attended the meeting, and 15 of us went for a beer after the talks. And again, there were a few new faces. Maybe that's because it was our first meeting of the season, or because of the new format (that I called a SchemeCamp). Or both. But I know that many people liked the idea of having short presentations. A variety of subjects helps gather more people, I think.



Let me briefly summarize the 4 presentations:

1. Christopher Diggins talked about Cat, a language he is currently developing. Cat is a stack-based language, like Factor, but it is functional and statically-typed. The goal of the talk was to show how Scheme can be compiled to Cat, but Christopher went short of time. I'm sure he will give another presentation in a near future.
   
   The slides from his talk can be found here.
   
   
   
2. Étienne Bergeron presented a number of results from his Ph.D. thesis work. Étienne is working on a JIT synthesizer, i.e. a JIT that generates FPGA configurations from Scheme code. He mentioned that, in the course of his work, he had to reverse engineer the Xilinx protocol using innovative techniques, but which seems to cause a number of IP problems. The JIT synthesizer is currently limited to small expressions, but the results are interesting and promising.
   
   
   
3. Adrien Piérard presented part of his Master's thesis work, namely a portable interpreter of Scheme, with an emphasis on serialization/deserialization issues for mobile code. The ultimate goal of his work is to provide a portable and interoperable implementation of Termite.
   
   
   
4. Finally, David St-Hilaire and Étienne Laurin described the implementation of the Tetris game in Scheme. Their implementation targets Tcl/Tk through PS/Tk, but they are now working on a SDL port. It can be obtained from Snow. Note that David and Étienne are undergraduate students and they worked on this project in their spare time.
   

In short, we had a great time! Thanks to all who contributed to this success.