Re: Anniversary hack: Zile editor with Guile support

["Gary V. Vaughan" <gary@gnu.org>]

Hi Ian,

On 25 Mar 2013, at 09:13, Ian Price <ianprice90@googlemail.com> wrote:
> "Gary V. Vaughan" <gary@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>> Rather than byte-code to byte-code translation, I was rather thinking of either:
>> 
>>  1. Tweaking zlc to be capable of compiling guile scheme directly to Lua (and
>>     then easily from there to Lua bytecodes); or
>>  2. Running Zile with the Guile implementation of Lua, and getting Guile as
>>     an extension language for free.
>> 
>> The first, I can do, though it's a long time since I paid attention to Guile,
>> so I'd need guidance and/or test-cases from someone familiar with it to make
>> sure my implementation would be compatible with canonical Guile Scheme.
> 
> Rather than going for Scheme integration, it'd be better to target
> tree-il, which is the level below it.

But surely, the point of having an Emacs that can be extended with Guile Scheme,
is that the user can feed Guile Scheme code to it?  (1) above proposes compiling
the users Scheme to Lua bytecodes for sandboxed evaluation by Lua Zile.

(2) above is outside of my skill-set.  I guess you are saying that resurrecting
Lua on Guile should target tree-il. 

>> The second, I was asking about because I was initially drawn to Guile during
>> the era when it was being touted as a good compiler target platform to become
>> a runtime for code written in any language and then translated to Guile Scheme
>> before execution.  But, my impression is that this work stalled and/or failed?
> 
> I'd say stalled, rather than failed.  We haven't heard from the
> "maintainer" for two years now, and I've been periodically asking around
> for people to pick it up, but without any luck.  The intersection of
> people interested in Guile and Lua is pretty small, it seems.

Yes indeed :(

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)