Meroon: an Object System in Scheme

Meroon-V3 now works with MzScheme, EdScheme... Meroon-V3 also supports DSSSL keywords in Meroon special forms as well as in generic functions. See also Meroon nicely bound to Gambit (Many thanks to Brad Lucier for that fine work).

The distinctive features of Meroon were:

• All objects of Scheme can be seen as Meroon objects (even vectors) without restriction on inheritance.
• CLOS-like generic functions. New generic functions and methods can be added on previousy defined classes. Generic functions can have a multiple arity and support multi-methods.
• Self-description features: classes are Meroon objects and can be inspected. It is also possible to design new metaclasses.
• Meroon is portable (this constrained a lot its design).
• A new instantiation protocol (handling co-instantiation).
• Meroon is really fast.

The source files of Meroon are available. You can also directly browse the documentation of Meroon or a research paper explaining parts of the implementation (and mainly how are compacted dispatchers).

A lightened version of Meroon exists, named Meroonet, in a single file, without libraries nor complex bootstrap. Meroonet is fully described in the LiSP book. Despite its pedagogical aspect, Meroonet is as fast as Meroon-V3 and only lacks many bells and whistles.  

F A Q

A mailing list exists to discuss Meroon and Meroonet aspects (don't be shy, the level of exchanged messages is really reasonable):

          meroon-info@spi.lip6.fr

          meroon-request@spi.lip6.fr

Related works

• [ijsahpc97] Building Domain-Specific Environments for Computational Science: A Case Study in Seismic Tomography.
• CS 615: Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations.