Requirements to merge "guilemacs" into trunk

Requirements to merge "guilemacs" into trunk

[Josh Tilles]

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The "wip-guile" branch of Emacs —available at
http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=summary— has been rebased onto the
latest state of the trunk (as of last week, 23 April 2013). And according
to the Guile Emacs ToDo page <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo>,
it is mostly indistinguishable from a normal Emacs build.

What would you need to see in order to be convinced that "wip-guile" is
mature enough to be incorporated into the trunk? Which concerns have yet to
be addressed?

--Josh

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Re: Requirements to merge "guilemacs" into trunk

[Stefan Monnier]

> What would you need to see in order to be convinced that "wip-guile" is
> mature enough to be incorporated into the trunk? Which concerns have yet to
> be addressed?

I don't know.  Because I don't really know what is "guilemacs" and what
"incorporate it" means.  I mean, I have some idea about what guilemacs
attempts to do, but for example I don't know to what extent we could
incorporate it without switching to it.


        Stefan

Re: Requirements to merge "guilemacs" into trunk

[Noah Lavine]

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Hello,

I'm not the author of Guilemacs, but I do work on Guile, and I just took a
look at the log of the Guilemacs repository (
http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=log). As I'm sure you know, the
goal is to use Guile as the ELisp interpreter (or really compiler) for
Emacs. I will try to summarize how it works, although I hope bpt himself
will email about it, since he wrote it.

I think that the single biggest change is garbage collection. Guile uses
bdw-gc, a library for conservative garbage collection. It looks like most
of the changes are converting Emacs to use that. I see that bpt also
disabled pure space, but I don't know if that's required by bdw-gc or just
convenient when one is working on garbage collection. Similarly, he
disabled asynchronous input, but I am quite sure Guile can do that, so I
don't know why he turned it off.

As for whether you could incorporate it without adopting it, I think the
answer is yes. You could have a configure option that would control whether
Emacs used its own ELisp interpreter or Guile's. This would touch a lot of
the C code, because it would also affect the garbage collection and the
object representation. But I don't see any reason it wouldn't work.

Hope this helps,
Noah Lavine


On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>wrote:

> > What would you need to see in order to be convinced that "wip-guile" is
> > mature enough to be incorporated into the trunk? Which concerns have yet
> to
> > be addressed?
>
> I don't know.  Because I don't really know what is "guilemacs" and what
> "incorporate it" means.  I mean, I have some idea about what guilemacs
> attempts to do, but for example I don't know to what extent we could
> incorporate it without switching to it.
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>

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