Kali Scheme Revival

Kali Scheme is a project started around 1995 by the Software Systems group at the NEC Research Institute. It is based upon Scheme 48.

What is Kali Scheme?

Kali Scheme is a distributed implementation of Scheme that permits efficient transmission of higher-order objects such as closures and continuations. The integration of distributed communication facilities within a higher-order programming language engenders a number of new abstractions and paradigms for distributed computing. Among these are user-specified load-balancing and migration policies for threads, incrementally-linked distributed computations, and parameterized client-server applications. Kali Scheme supports concurrency and communication using first-class procedures and continuations. It integrates procedures and continuations into a message-based distributed framework that allows any Scheme object (including code vectors) to be sent and received in a message. Some of the applications and implementation techniques we have looked at using Kali Scheme include:

Revival

The active development branch can be found at the arch repository. It is recommened to use the stable version in the tarball.

If you would like to contribute contact me at zitterbewegung (at) gmail (dot) com or on libera in #scheme.

There is also a Kali Scheme entry at the C2 Wiki, and a Kali Scheme Revival entry at the Community Scheme Wiki.

Related papers

Kali Scheme is described in Higher-Order Distributed Objects , ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, September 1995.

Papers on Kali Scheme and related topics can be found here. (Note this link is broken. I can't find this part of the website.)

Availability

The current release of Kali can be downloaded via HTTP at kali-0.52.2.tar.gz.

A depiction of the goddess Kali

Picture of Kali