Re: Guile 3 and wip-elisp/Emacs

[Robin Templeton <robin@terpri.org>]

"Gregg Sangster" <gregg@thesangsters.ca> writes:

> Hello Guile Hackers,
>
> I've rebased the wip-elisp branch on top of commit
> 449f50dd84a081aea16ef678e32bf37abe429ff6 (git describe:
> v3.0.4-64-g33232cb5c4).  It's published here:
>
> https://git.sr.ht/~g20r/guile

This is wonderful, thank you! (IIUC, Christine and Ricardo wrote
ChangeLog entries and did some rebasing, but I don't think it's been
fully rebased for some time, so this is a big step forward!)

N.B. The commit messages need minor rewording, so this will require
trivial changes before merging even if's otherwise perfect.

> There are two additional failed tests which appear to be new tests
> added since the last work on the wip-elisp branch.  Also, ./configure
> requires the --disable-jit option as the build fails otherwise.  I
> have not yet investigated any of these issues.

Christine noted some "questionable" compiler changes, where my changes
might conflict with Andy's, so this isn't surprising but it's useful to
have potential confirmation. The elisp changes were fairly simple, so it
shouldn't be too difficult to fix, if that is indeed the problem.

> I don't have much experience with Guile itself or the Guile codebase.
> The next commit has a conflict I was not able to resolve: that's why
> it's not rebased all the way up to the tip of main.  My next tasks are
> to get the current Guile Emacs running on this version of Guile
> followed by fixing the JIT build failure, rebasing this to the tip of
> main and rebasing Guile Emacs on a more recent Emacs (I believe it is
> currently v24.something).

Rebasing onto a somewhat newer Emacs should be pretty straightforword,
and certainly worthwhile on its on. However, rebasing onto emacs master
is a major task that'll probably take several person-months of fairly
tedious work...

> My question is if this is worthwhile work?  I don't have much time to
> spend on it but am happy to keep hacking away if there's still
> upstream interest.

From my perspective, it certainly is! There is plenty of interest from
the Guile side AFAICT; the Emacs maintainers have been (understandably)
skeptical about the project in general, but if we can make it correct
*and* fast I think they'll be more interested, especially if Guile 3's
JIT outperforms emacs native-comp in practice.

Thanks,
Robin

-- 
<robin> "Digital Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Computing Capitalism"
<dsk>   -- the Lenin of Emacs