compile Racket symbols to js Symbol values?

[stchang]

js has Symbol values now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Symbol

Would it be appropriate to compile Racket symbols to these js values?

(@samth Do you know if these would be compatible with Racket symbols, eg interning?)

[samth]

Basically, yes. Symbol.for creates an interned symbol. Symbol("foo") is uninterned. Symbol() is basically gensym.

[stchang]

Oh so it should be straightforward then and we can get rid of our Symbol class, nice.

[DarrenN]

I'm working my way through the source to understand how the AST is compiled to the IL and then to JS, so please bear with me. It looks like this is where symbol?s are tagged(?) to call the core.Symbol class: https://github.com/racketscript/racketscript/blob/master/racketscript-compiler/racketscript/compiler/transform.rkt#L617

Am I correct in thinking that instead we would remove that and allow symbol? to fall through to line 661 to become an ILValue and we would later use native Symbols instead?

Thinking in assemble-value we could do something like:

[(symbol? v)
     (emit "Symbol(~a)" v)]

[vishesh]

Hey, thanks for taking this. Yes, that sounds right. You can also probably just replace the part where we do (ILApp 'core.Symbol.make) to just (ILApp 'Symbol ... ) as it basically looks just like function application. However, what you propose is IMO better.

[stchang]

I'll be able to take a look at this early next week. Thanks again for doing this.