Journal/16 Germinal CCXV from Evan Prodromou

There's no business like snow business. I'm excited to have stumbled across the Snowfort, the cool new collection of Scheme libraries put together by Marc Feeley and his band of clever fellows at University of Montreal.

Snowfort is cool because it's a cross-platform library of modules. There are at least a half-dozen leading Scheme implementations out there, and probably another dozen or two respectable ones. The "Snow" project has built abstraction layers over the major implementations, and then started building portable libraries for important services like HTTP, MIME encoding/decoding, CGI and Asterisk plugins.

I think this is a cool effort; it's definitely needed in the Scheme community, as a step past the admirable but limited SRFI process. I'm going to convert a couple of my Scheme packages (XML-RPC, HTTP content negotiation, others) to be "snowballs" instead.

My main concern right now is that the snowball format doesn't seem to integrate well with R⁶RS libraries. I hope that's something that's adapted soon to future-proof these cool tools.

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