Re: Emacs and Guile

[BT Templeton <bpt@hcoop.net>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 11:36:05 +0800
>> 
>> On 2012-04-10 06:28 +0800, Bastien wrote:
>> > ,----[ Guile-Emacs ]
>> > | 
>> > | Use libguile as the basis for Emacs's Lisp implementation and begin
>> > | replacing the Elisp interpreter with Guile
>> > | 
>> > | http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/bpt/23002
>> > `----
>> 
>> I am looking forward to this ;)
>
> I don't.
>
> FWIW, my (admittedly short) experience with Guile is that it is not
> reliable or stable on anything but GNU/Linux, and even there it has
> much to catch up.  It has a lot to gain in terms of portability before
> it can be considered seriously as an alternative to ELisp, or even its
> sibling on equal rights.

Guile would need better Microsoft Windows and MS-DOS support before
using Guile as the default Elisp implementation. But that's not a reason
to delay work on Guile-Emacs for free systems.

In what respect does Guile need to catch up on GNU/Linux?

> To me, the failure to build in these cases is a clear sign of a
> package that is not ready for prime time.

...on non-free, non-POSIX platforms, yes.

> Or consider Guile's support of non-ASCII characters, which relies on
> libiconv with no additional features -- we cannot possibly consider
> this complete enough to replace what we have in Emacs now.

Fortunately, Guile doesn't need to immediately replace what Emacs has
now. It's less elegant to make Elisp strings a separate type, and would
make interaction with Scheme less pleasant, but for an experimental
version it would be acceptable.

> And before you consider the above FUD and nothing else: GNU Make
> recently added Guile support (available only from the Make CVS
> repository for now), and even though Make's needs are much simpler
> than Emacs's, you can get the feeling about the problems in this
> thread:
>
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2012-01/msg00130.html

I don't see the significance of this particular thread; it's a trivial
problem that was quickly resolved. And it's at most a minor bug in Guile
(the return value of `define' is unspecified in R5RS).

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