Re: Lightning Bindings

[Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com>]

They claim that MELT is tightly integrated with GCC, but after reading http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/MiddleEndLispTranslator, I don't believe it. The "MELT compiler implementation" description suggests that it's a pretty simple-minded sexp-to-C translator. I also notice that none of the examples has any control structures more complicated than `if` and `foreach`. I'd say it's basically a nice syntax for messing with GCC data structures.

When the page says "very tightly integrated into GCC", it seems to mean "has boxed versions of a few internal GCC data structures" (there's a list on the page I link. It's not very long). That shouldn't be hard at all to connect Guile to.

The only part that could be tricky is interfacing with GCC's garbage collection. I don't know how Guile's FFI interacts with other memory management systems, so this could be a problem, but I think it could be done. It's going to have to be solved anyway if Guile is going to interface with other memory management systems.

Besides, this is one of Guile's objectives, isn't it? GNU programs shouldn't need to implement their own extension languages, because Guile can handle it.

Noah