From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>
To: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
Cc: Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>,
Emacs development discussions <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: advice needed for multi-threading patch
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:39:13 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <24F68B6C-96CD-4360-86E2-B0B2597B1633@raeburn.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <buor5uxyhdu.fsf@dhlpc061.dev.necel.com>
On Aug 27, 2009, at 01:07, Miles Bader wrote:
> Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org> writes:
>> in part, to replace the most fundamental layer -- representation,
>> allocation and GC -- with Guile.
>
> Do we actually want to do this? How is guile regarded these days
> (back
> in the day, it was a horrid bloated mess)?
I still think of this project partly as being in the "let's see how it
works out and decide if we want to keep it" stage, or even "let's try
this big application and see what problems we find in Guile". So I'm
not quite ready to answer -- or ask -- if we want to do it. With a
bit more polish, and some more intense testing, and performance
analysis, maybe...
I can't really speak to how Guile is regarded; I do much more stuff in
the Emacs and Guile internals than with ordinary applications that
might use it, and I'm by no stretch of the imagination any kind of
Scheme expert. But I don't think how Guile is regarded should be as
important as how Guile *is*. If there are real problems with using it
in Emacs -- as opposed to everyone just remembering how it *used* to
be considered a "horrid bloated mess" -- then we can try to fix them
on the Guile side, or decide to drop the project.
It's had performance problems for some time, but recent work has made
some big improvements, putting it back in competition with some of the
other implementations, and there's a bit of talk about compiling not
just to VM byte codes but even to native code for some architectures
someday. It sounds a bit like pie-in-the-sky stuff, and some of these
sorts of things have moved very slowly in Guile development in the
past, but the guy doing the compiler and optimizer work right now is
making some good progress, and I wouldn't put it past him. There's
also some GC system work happening, but I haven't been following that
closely. And if we wind up in a situation where doing such work
benefits both Guile and Emacs because one is using the code from the
other, it *could* be good for both projects. (And, of course, if it
goes badly, it could make it harder to improve things all around.)
Thread support is another example -- if Emacs were already using Guile
underneath the Lisp engine, thread support would probably be quite a
bit easier.
My reasoning for trying this is in some ways political as well as
technical. Guile is touted as the GNU project's extension language.
Yet one of the highest-profile, most-extensible and most-extended
programs GNU ships doesn't use it, but instead uses a separate,
private implementation of a rather similar language. If "GNU's
extension language" isn't good enough for this application, and can't
be made good enough, then maybe we should declare it a failure as
"GNU's extension language" and either do something else or drop the
idea entirely. But I don't think we've gotten to that point.
And on the technical side, I'm trying to keep most of the work in the
Emacs "application-level" code non-specific to Guile, so if someone
decides to replace the Lisp engine with something other than Guile, my
changes to isolate the implementation details and assumptions made may
still not be wasted.
BTW, if anyone is interested in helping on the Guile-Emacs work, I'd
love to have some help. There's quite a number of pieces still to be
tackled, some purely on the Emacs side, others having to do with
making the interaction between the two work better....
Ken
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-08-27 6:39 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 54+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-08-26 4:38 advice needed for multi-threading patch Tom Tromey
2009-08-26 7:06 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-08-26 14:52 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-08-26 18:50 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-08-27 3:12 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-08-27 6:28 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-08-27 17:02 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-08-26 16:08 ` Tom Tromey
2009-08-26 18:50 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-08-27 5:07 ` Miles Bader
2009-08-27 6:39 ` Ken Raeburn [this message]
2009-08-27 6:50 ` Miles Bader
2009-08-28 20:48 ` Juri Linkov
2009-08-28 22:15 ` Miles Bader
2009-08-28 23:27 ` Juri Linkov
2009-08-28 23:54 ` Miles Bader
2009-08-29 20:21 ` Richard Stallman
2009-08-26 15:02 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-08-26 15:31 ` Tom Tromey
2009-08-26 19:18 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-18 22:59 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-19 0:09 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-09-19 0:32 ` Chong Yidong
2009-09-21 21:19 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-21 21:50 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-22 14:24 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-22 23:59 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-09-23 3:11 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-23 15:53 ` Chong Yidong
2009-09-23 3:16 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-24 17:25 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-24 17:57 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-27 20:59 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-27 23:05 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-28 4:27 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-29 0:27 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-29 2:26 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-09-29 3:20 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-29 3:57 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-09-29 3:33 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-29 4:07 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-09-29 2:30 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-23 18:43 ` Giuseppe Scrivano
2009-09-24 17:29 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-24 18:53 ` Giuseppe Scrivano
2009-09-24 20:04 ` Tom Tromey
2009-09-24 21:59 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-09-24 22:23 ` Giuseppe Scrivano
2009-09-24 22:47 ` Ken Raeburn
2009-09-28 14:52 ` Ted Zlatanov
2009-10-05 6:02 ` joakim
2009-09-28 7:44 ` Lynbech Christian
2009-08-29 0:28 ` Giuseppe Scrivano
2009-08-29 4:57 ` Tom Tromey
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