Re: Why do we spend time on Emacs on Guile?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org>]

storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:

   How many of the members on emacs-devel plan to switch to Guile once
   it is available?

if it's done right, guile availability won't require switching; it will
just Be There.  of course, there are ways to Be quite ugly but that's
another question.  it should always be possible to write elisp programs
and expect emacs to execute them.

   Why would you do that?

for one thing, guile scheme object properties are very general (at
least, historically).  most anything can be a property as well as a
value.  it's easy to build trees w/ this kind of facility.

   Have you ever programmed in Guile/Scheme ?  How much?

check out http://www.glug.org/maint/ for ongoing travails...  also
relevant to this list would be a google search for "gap-buffer.scm" and
in the same directory edit.scm.  see gpgutils.scm for example usage of
edit.scm (warning: not suitable for either scheme or elisp purists ;-).

   I doubt very many existing Emacs Lisp packages will be converted to
   Guile, so what are the performance issues of not doing so if Emacs
   uses Guile internally?  

it used to be you could compile a large subset of guile scheme to a
shared object library (.so file) and of course load that.  perhaps that
will be possible again in the future.  see latest SCM by Aubrey Jaffer.

thi