Re: Lightning Bindings

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

() Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com>
() Tue, 1 Jun 2010 10:57:15 -0400

   I didn't realize GCC had a Lisp interface.

It has a recently (2009?) approved run-time plug-in system, for
which MELT is one example.  Incidently, Emacs also has also recently
won approval for the development of a analogous architecture, so...

   Interfacing with GCC would be excellent.

...yeah, i think the most riteous hack would involve GCC (and Emacs).
That's not to say there could be other valid (and most likely easier
to achieve with less work) approaches.

   This is perhaps far-fetched, but I think the best thing would
   be if we could persuade them to replace MELT with Guile. It
   looks to me from the docs like MELT is yet another Lisp engine,
   which is exactly what Guile is trying to replace. We could
   offer them a well-tested, more-feature-complete extension
   language, and they could offer us interfaces to good code
   generation.

On this i disagree, perhaps because persuasion is not one of my
strengths.  I tend to think, what if i were the MELT hacker?
Would i want this kind of noise in my playground?  My answer might
well be: Why don't you study MELT, develop a congruent Guile-based
system, and then we'll talk.

But that's just the curmudgeon (who perceives precious time
passing ever faster) in me talking; take it FWIW.  I hope you keep
us updated on this matter -- it's very exciting in any case!

thi