Re: [r6rs-discuss] Implementors' intentions concerning R6RS

From: Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>
To: "Julian Graham" <joolean@gmail.com>
Cc: Guile Development <guile-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: [r6rs-discuss] Implementors' intentions concerning R6RS
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:15:25 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <874pg8w5wy.fsf@ossau.uklinux.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <2bc5f8210710300801o6de398aeg968bcb73bb0cc5e@mail.gmail.com> (Julian Graham's message of "Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:01:05 -0400")

"Julian Graham" <joolean@gmail.com> writes:

> Well, for what it's worth, faster live "interpretation" of Scheme is
> really important to me, whether that means some kind of Scheme JIT
> compilation a la GNU Lightning or whatever.  I'm still fairly wed to
> being able to "script" my C code with Scheme dynamically, so I hope
> Guile's not moving away from that significantly.

I don't think anyone intends that.

>  Other non-specific,
> poorly-researched desires for 1.9:
>
> * Faster GC

From the recent experiments vs. Boehm GC, my impression was that
Guile's GC is already pretty good and that there is little scope for
improvement here.

> (this is probably pretty similar to "faster interpretation")

Actually that's a completely different matter.  There are lots of
options here; for example, Keisuke Nishida's VM work.

> * Integrated debugging and profiling tools

Absolutely.

> * Guile was initially proposed as a multi-language scripting platform;
> is that still part of the mission?

IMO, after umpteen years of not-happening, it would be silly for us to
say that this is still a core part of the mission.  But technically I
think this is still an interesting idea.  There's a load of half-done
stuff out there: Thomas Bushnell's Python, Ian Bicking's Tcl, Ctax, my
Elisp; a good first step would be just to pull that all together, and
see if there's a coherent big picture.  For Python there's also the
possibility of leveraging PyPy.

> * Not related to 1.9 itself, but maybe a cleanup / redesign of the web
> page,

Yes, in principle.  Needs someone to volunteer though.

> including a cleanup of active projects,

That's in my list too.

> better integration with Savannah for bug tracking, etc.

I started looking at this this week.  After a bit of thought, I'm
thinking that even if we automatically gatewayed bug-guile emails into
the Savannah tracker, we'd still want to review the new bugs as they
appear - and so we might as well just cut and paste them from
bug-guile by hand.

> * Thorough updating of the documentation

Agreed.  That's on my list, but one can't have too much help!

> * Integration with Free Software VMs -- Bigloo currently lets you
> compile Scheme to CIL; it would be neat if you could do the same with
> Guile and then run on top of DotGNU.  Or Kaffe.  Or anything else.

Yes, that would be nice.  Except I'm not keen on following Microsoft
"standards".  Java VM and/or Parrot (is that still happening?) would
be fine.

Regards,
        Neil

_______________________________________________
Guile-devel mailing list
Guile-devel@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-devel