Hi all,

I've released version 0.7 of guile-vm. I hope I'm not stepping on toes
for this one, but I felt it was a good idea to get a tarball out there
that self-compiles fine and that distchecks. I've attached the NEWS.

  tarball: http://wingolog.org/pub/guile-vm-0.7.tar.gz
  git: http://wingolog.org/git/guile-vm.git

I also have to apologize again for not working in Ludovic's doc updates,
or responding properly -- my mail is still borked. Perhaps it will
unbork today.

So the question is: where to from here? Here is an unordered series of
thoughts, observations, etc.

 * Guile-VM does not currently offer a significant speed advantage over
   the interpreter. It is mostly faster by about 2 times or so, but
   sometimes slower. On the other hand I haven't profiled it yet. And,
   on the other other hand, loading compiled code is really quick.

 * I have fixed macro compilation for syncase macros. Yay.

 * Guile-VM appears to produce correct code. I have not comprehensively
   proven this, though.

 * If you have a .go file in the same place as a .scm file, and you have
   loaded (system vm core) at some time in the past, then `use-modules'
   will automatically load your compiled file instead of the .scm file.
   This is part of boot-9. It should (but currently does not) stat to
   make sure the .go file is up to date, though.

 * GOOPS-using code does not yet compile. I think that it probably needs
   quite a rework in order to compile, in order to make sure that all
   effects are performed via e.g. what define-class expands out to
   instead of by the expander itself.

 * I am relying on a few Guile patches. Some of them I've sent and not
   gotten around to properly responding to and fixing, and some of them
   I have not. I'm attaching them all after the NEWS.

 * The code generated by Guile-VM is OK. The preambles are quite crap
   though.

 * Debugging currently sucks, there is no source-level information, and
   I haven't yet been able to understand Kei's vision in that regard. I
   think that Ludovic knows more about this.

 * I need to get a copyright assignment for pmatch.scm.

 * The real wins on startup time and such will come when boot-9.scm is
   compiled, and all of ice-9/ is compiled. I would love for this to
   happen. This would require Guile-VM becoming a part of Guile. I think
   that the debugging support (backtraces at least) should be better
   before that happens, though.

That's all of my thoughts for now. Please give the tarball a go, and let
me know if you react to any of these thoughts!

Andy