Guile portability?

Guile portability?

[Paul Smith]

I can't find any statements on the Guile pages about portability: what
operating systems does it support, how well are they supported, etc.?

Before I started using Guile I naively assumed it was basically just a
parser and so it was almost trivially very portable.  Now that I see all
the advanced features and capabilities it strikes me that Guile is not
nearly so easily ported to non-POSIX-style systems as I assumed.

The docs say it's "the official language for the GNU operating system",
but what about non-GNU OS's, such as AIX/Solaris/HP-UX, the various
BSD's, or Windows, or MacOS, or even more specialized environments like
OpenVMS, AmigaOS, etc.?


Cheers!

Re: Guile portability?

[objc]

Hi Paul,

On the Microsoft Windows front, it builds if you use cygwin (for the POSIX) 
stuff.

The README file with the guile distribution gives you info. on how to build 
it on different systems.

John.
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Paul Smith" <psmith@gnu.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 7:03 PM
To: <guile-user@gnu.org>
Subject: Guile portability?

> I can't find any statements on the Guile pages about portability: what
> operating systems does it support, how well are they supported, etc.?
>
> Before I started using Guile I naively assumed it was basically just a
> parser and so it was almost trivially very portable.  Now that I see all
> the advanced features and capabilities it strikes me that Guile is not
> nearly so easily ported to non-POSIX-style systems as I assumed.
>
> The docs say it's "the official language for the GNU operating system",
> but what about non-GNU OS's, such as AIX/Solaris/HP-UX, the various
> BSD's, or Windows, or MacOS, or even more specialized environments like
> OpenVMS, AmigaOS, etc.?
>
>
> Cheers!
>
>
> 

Re: Guile portability?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Paul,

Guile exercises a very large subset of the POSIX API (file system,
networking, threads, etc.) and thus is quite exposed to portability
issues.  I suspect it’s not as portable as GNU Make, but that can be
fixed.

We mostly check it on GNU variants, but also on MacOS X and FreeBSD and
from time to time on Solaris and a few others.  Fortunately, Guile uses
Gnulib, and a large part of the OS-sensitive APIs is wrapped by Gnulib.

Thanks,
Ludo’.