Re: Anniversary hack: Zile editor with Guile support

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

Hi Ian,

On 25 Mar 2013, at 11:10, Ian Price <ianprice90@googlemail.com> wrote:
> "Gary V. Vaughan" <gary@gnu.org> writes:
>>>> 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.
> 
> Of course we'd prefer Scheme, but I don't think that has to mean writing
> a new Guile-compatible Scheme implementation, and implementing Tree-IL
> doesn't preclude it.
> 
> Guile is made up of several layers: Scheme/Tree-IL/GLIL/Assembly/etc.
> and we expose these through various modules. If you want to write a
> compiler for Scheme (in this case to Lua bytecode), we have the
> infrastructure available and documented for you.
> 
> I suggest Tree-IL since that is the compilation target we recommend for
> new languages (both elisp and ecmascript compile to this), but if it is
> convenient for Lua bytecode, pick an even lower level one.

I think we are misunderstanding one another somewhere :(

I'm talking about this:

  1. user writes some Guile Scheme, and feeds it to Lua Zile
  2. Lua Zile runs zlc to translate Guile Scheme to Lua
  3. Lua Zile runs luac to compile output of (2) to Lua bytecodes, and
     saves the result to disk
  4. Lua runtime executes file of Lua bytecodes.

I really don't see how Tree-IL fits in here, or makes loading and executing Guile
Scheme sources from Lua Zile any easier.

What am I missing?

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