bug#48530: Guile Mode

bug#48530: Guile Mode

[Jérémy Korwin-Zmijowski]

Dear Emacs team,

I am Jérémy, an Emacs and Guile user. I came to discover both in the
same time about three years ago.
I am not a member of the GNU project, nor FSF. I'm just a GNU
enthousiast.

When I edit Guile code in Emacs, I rely mostly on :
Scheme mode + Geiser + Paredit + Autocomplete/Company + Projectile +
Magit

Then come other extensions.

I am writing to you today to start a conversation (hopefully a work)
around a kind of "Guile mode" (why not something with IDE
capabilities). I remember Eli incentivizing people to do so on Guile
user mailing list.

I don't know the spirit and the boundaries of the Emacs project.
Here is a list of things that I would like to be able to do in Emacs
while writing Guile code.
(I would like to know if there are things that fit to the scope of your
project ? For the ones that do not, I will contact the relevant
stakeholders.)

- take in charge the support of Geiser for Guile ?
- provide features to "refactor" Guile code (i.e extract a
value/procedure into a local/top-level define or let expression, toogle
a variable to be private or public, change procedure signature and
propagate change, move to another file/module and auto-import it) ?
- auto import Guile modules according to unbound variables ?
- instrument the code (set and stepover breakpoints)

Thank you,
Jérémy

bug#48530: Guile Mode

[Jose A. Ortega Ruiz]

On Thu, May 20 2021, Jérémy Korwin-Zmijowski wrote:

[...]

> - take in charge the support of Geiser for Guile ?

you're certainly most welcome to contribute to geiser and geiser-guile
in the usual ways, via the gitlab group and repos, mailing list, irc
channel, etc.  unlike some other geiser subprojects, they're not
unmaintained (said as their original author and still maintainer :)),

it's true we would greatly benefit from further collaboration for new
features (like the ones you suggest below), because i haven't had much
time for the project during the last years, so i've been focused on bug
fixing.

after a few patches that make it into the repo, i'd be very glad to add
you to the gitlab group with write permissions and even nominate you as
the main maintainer.  the recent split of the monolithic repo into
per-scheme projects was in fact an attempt to attrack new maintainers
that could focus on specific scheme implementations.

this reminds me of the geiser-racket story: racket was, with guile, the
best supported scheme in geiser, but geiser-racket was eventually
ignored by the racket community when a new racket-mode appeared that
started from zero reimplementing lots of things that were already in
geiser.  i'm not sad about racket-mode taking over (i am sure it is
because it's a better package than geiser-racket, so that's fair), but
about the effort wasted.  if you guys finally decide to start a separate
guile-mode project, just make sure to steal what we already have in
geiser that might be useful.  i'll be happy to help and pass on the
baton! :)

cheers,
jao
-- 
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake
him up.
  - Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming

bug#48530: Guile Mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Jérémy Korwin-Zmijowski
>  <jeremy@korwin-zmijowski.fr>
> Date: Thu, 20 May 2021 10:57:11 +0200
> 
> I am Jérémy, an Emacs and Guile user. I came to discover both in the
> same time about three years ago.
> I am not a member of the GNU project, nor FSF. I'm just a GNU
> enthousiast.
> 
> When I edit Guile code in Emacs, I rely mostly on :
> Scheme mode + Geiser + Paredit + Autocomplete/Company + Projectile +
> Magit
> 
> Then come other extensions.
> 
> I am writing to you today to start a conversation (hopefully a work)
> around a kind of "Guile mode" (why not something with IDE
> capabilities). I remember Eli incentivizing people to do so on Guile
> user mailing list.
> 
> I don't know the spirit and the boundaries of the Emacs project.
> Here is a list of things that I would like to be able to do in Emacs
> while writing Guile code.
> (I would like to know if there are things that fit to the scope of your
> project ? For the ones that do not, I will contact the relevant
> stakeholders.)
> 
> - take in charge the support of Geiser for Guile ?
> - provide features to "refactor" Guile code (i.e extract a
> value/procedure into a local/top-level define or let expression, toogle
> a variable to be private or public, change procedure signature and
> propagate change, move to another file/module and auto-import it) ?
> - auto import Guile modules according to unbound variables ?
> - instrument the code (set and stepover breakpoints)

I think in general we would welcome any improvement and extensions in
our current support for Scheme and Guile.  If there are some known
issues with our existing Scheme modes, any improvements are welcome in
general.

Refactoring Scheme code is definitely within what we consider to be
the scope of Emacs; we have some generic support for that in the Xref
package and the related APIs.

I never used Geiser (and am not a very active user of Guile), so I
don't know whether it would make sense for us to take over the Geiser
project.  But some capabilities, like being able to run Guile in REPL
from Emacs would definitely make sense in core (or maybe they already
are, and just need to be extended?).

The latter 2 points sound like they belong to Guile proper, or maybe I
don't understand what you meant by them?

Thanks.

bug#48530: Guile Mode

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Jérémy Korwin-Zmijowski <jeremy@korwin-zmijowski.fr> writes:

> I am writing to you today to start a conversation (hopefully a work)
> around a kind of "Guile mode" (why not something with IDE
> capabilities). I remember Eli incentivizing people to do so on Guile
> user mailing list.

(I'm going through old bug reports that unfortunately weren't resolved
at the time.)

We'd certainly welcome more support for Guile in Emacs, and there's
already a large number of Geiser packages (including geiser-guile) in
NonGNU ELPA.  But I don't think there's anything actionable in this bug
report, so I'm therefore closing it.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no