D
David Thompson
dthompson.us · Personal blog · on HN since 2014
David Thompson writes about Guile Scheme, Guix, game engines, static site generation and functional reactive interfaces.
What HN saysHN links it for Guile Scheme and Guix posts, such as optimizing Guile and propagators; commenters mention it when discussing static site generators.
30HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
21stories submitted
933story points
10 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Chickadee – Game Engine for Guile Scheme4 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 2Optimizing Guile Scheme3 people · 168 points · first shared 2024 · 80 comments on HN
- 3Functional reactive user interfaces with propagators3 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 4Sly: 2D/3D game engine in Guile Scheme3 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 5Haunt, a static site generator written in Guile Scheme3 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 6Guix for Development2 people · 138 points · first shared 2022 · 76 comments on HN
- 7Ruby on Guix2 people · 74 points · first shared 2015 · 49 comments on HN
- 8Functional Reactive Programming in Scheme with guile-2d2 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Installing Guix on a 10th gen ThinkPad X1 (2022)2 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 10Lisp: Icing or Cake?1 people · 244 points · first shared 2024 · 52 comments on HN
- 11WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics1 people · 143 points · first shared 2025 · 103 comments on HN
- 12Reproducible Development Environments with GNU Guix1 people · 84 points · first shared 2014 · 20 comments on HN
- 13Issues with object-oriented programming in Guile (2022)1 people · 59 points · first shared 2024 · 4 comments on HN
- 14Catbird: An experimental Scheme game engine1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 15Guix for Development1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
teddyrood · 2025-02-10
I'd love to hear of static site generator tech that has a good history of stability.
I too take a basic approach, where I use pandoc to generate HTML according to a template, but I'm lacking an RSS feed. That's a bit fiddly to hack up.
https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html looks okay.
davexunit · 2024-07-09
Yeah I can't see most of the videos, either. :(
I absolutely love Alexey Radul's dissertation. So interesting to see this article show up on the HN front page after I just published my own experiment with propagators yesterday: https://dthompson.us/posts/functional-reactive-user-interfaces-with-pr…
I need to learn more about the design decisions behind scoped propagators and why they deviate from "regular" propagators.
Zambyte · 2024-02-01
I guess it makes sense that it's a common name, but I was expecting this David Thomson[0] instead :-)
[0] https://dthompson.us/
lenkite · 2025-08-27
Nowadays static typing is the rage for maintainability and sustainability. Types also assist performance. https://dthompson.us/posts/optimizing-guile-scheme.html
itishappy · 2024-09-26
Optimizing Guile Scheme
https://dthompson.us/posts/optimizing-guile-scheme.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41600903
ryukafalz · 2024-07-26
This is all making me think... this could be a good use case for propagators: https://dthompson.us/posts/functional-reactive-user-interfaces-with-pr…
schemescape · 2023-11-03
There are a few that take that approach, but people usually want one in their preferred programming language/runtime. Examples:
Metalsmith (Node/JS): https://metalsmith.io/
Haunt (Guile Scheme): https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html
I’m sure there are many more.
hackermailman · 2017-04-24
I replaced all that with guix environment https://github.com/pjotrp/guix-notes it works well for Ruby too https://dthompson.us/ruby-on-guix.html
dqv · 2017-02-05
For anyone interested, things are close, they just need to be glued:
In guile, (htmlprag) addresses the import[1]. It handles "weird html". The SXML modules[2] can handle encoding and rendering. CDATA is the only thing (that seems to be) missing. I'll have to look into that.
Someone also made a module to render html[3].
[1]http://www.nongnu.org/guile-lib/doc/ref/htmlprag/
[2]https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/guile.html#SXML
[3]https://dthompson.us/rendering-html-with-sxml-and-gnu-guile.html
talideon · 2015-11-06
> This site, however, is a load of pure propaganda.
No, it's advertising, and not dishonest advertising.
> You can create applications on the web with Lisp? Really?!?
Yes! You know, something on the server has to generate the content.
> And tell me about all of those wonderful command-line games!
They point to a game engine written with guile: http://dthompson.us/pages/software/sly.html
> But then there is always the "more". Whatever the hell that is.
Because it's a Turing-complete programming language: that's what the 'more' is. You can do practically anything you can imagine with it.