GNOME for Scheme48

I'm curious as to why a Scheme48 binding is helpful or desirable to you. Specifically, why Scheme48 above its alternatives, and likewise, why GNOME above its alternatives?

I can't speak for rotty, but I see three main strengths for scheme48:

1. scsh is built on top of it, which most people think is the right sort of way to use scheme for scripting UNIX. There are plans to port scsh elsewhere, and I've heard rumours of a complete port, but there are no complete, mature implementations on other schemes;
2. scheme48 builds using prescheme, which is a closureless, runtimeless vrestriction of scheme that compiles very efficiently;
3. scheme is build in a pretty robust and comprehensible way: it's nice code to read, by and large. It's one of the more attractive schemes to hack on. Noteworthy point: scheme48 was sused as a starting point for the VLISP provably correct compiler project.

As I'm not only interested in just using the language implementation, but also on the internals, both because having insight into them can teach you a lot of things and because of nececessity: sometimes you have to be quite familiar with the implementation internals to make certain applications or (esp. extensions). As chalst already explained, Scheme48 is a very "hackable" implementation and has several features that make it technically interesting. Besides the VLISP project, there is also Kali Scheme built upon it, a distributed extension of Scheme48 that makes distribution transparent to a degree rather unimaginable in "mainstream" languages. As for choosing Scheme over alternatives: IMO, the Lisp family, with its powerful syntactic macro systems, and Scheme in particuliar (hygienic macros, continuations), are on the upper end of the spectrum of expressiveness of computer languages (at the other end would be assembly/machine code).

Now GNOME: I chose that, because it's written in C, which has the following desirable properties:

• It's rather simple, esp. when compared with it's "big (and ugly, IMO) brother" C++.
• The simplicity makes it easy (or easier, at least) to create bindings for C libraries.

Furthermore, GTK+/GNOME was written with language bindings in mind and provides an API taylored towards that. Also, I'm already involved with guile-gnome and thus have already a good bit of experience in GNOME language bindings. Last but not least, GTK+/GNOME as opposed to QT (the obvious alternative) is a real community-driven project.

All I have to say is that I'm all for it. It would also be nice to have sort of "partial" bindings like plain Gtk+. Not all desktops are running full gnome or want to install all of it.

I hope it will also make it to distributions and porters/packagers instead of being just another crufty binding hidden somewhere.