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Международная история города Глупова, Смешное

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Stalin

Stalin is an aggressively optimizing Scheme compiler. It is the most highly optimizing Scheme compiler, and in fact one of the most highly optimizing compilers of any sort for any language. Stalin is publicly & freely available, licensed under the GNU GPL. It was written by Jeffrey M. Siskind.

In detail, Stalin is a whole-program compiler that uses advanced flow analysis & closure conversion techniques. It compiles Scheme to highly optimized C. Stalin has a few very significant limitations, however:

it takes a long time to compile anything including the compiler
it is not designed for interactive use or debugging
it does not support R4RS/R5RS high-level macros
it does not support the full numeric tower

The latest version is Stalin 0.11.

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И естественно сталиносрач в comp.lang.lisp:

Rolf-Thomas Hap:

Jeffrey Mark Siskind:
> Stalin, an optimizing compiler for Scheme, is free and open source. It is
[...]
Would you mind explaining your choice of the name "Stalin"?
I tried to look it up on your Web pages, I didn't find anything.
I am of Polish origin and I am afraid to touch it.
Perhaps the internal documentation provides the clues, but
the tar.Z file takes 15M.
Indeed, the internal doc (stalin-0.7/README) expands the acronym:
Stalin - a STAtic Language ImplementatioN
Finally, a Lisp compiler that does what it should...
(Stalin does global compile-time analysis of a single Scheme source
file, provided the code stays away from Scheme's dynamic features:
LOAD, EVAL, and the like.)
rthappe

Lennart Augustsso:

Regardless of where the name comes from, I don't think
it's a good name. Would you want to name a language Hitler?
I don't want to get into politics, but I think Stalin was,
in many ways, as bad as Hitler, but he was among the winners
of the war.

Rolf-Thomas Hap:

Regardless of where the name comes from, I don't think
it's a good name. Would you want to name a language Hitler?
This issue has been discussed in comp.lang.lisp at some length.
(As for me, I don't see that a compiler named "Stalin" furthers
purges, mass starvation, etc. I find that the Stalinist policy
of forced industrialisation relates rather well to an aggressively
optimising compiler. Besides, the more harmless "Stakhanov" or
so would hardly make acronymic sense, and it would lack the flair.
-- No, I wouldn't want to name a language (nor a compiler) "Hitler".)
rthappe