Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Amirouche <amirouche@hypermove.net>]

Héllo!


Le 10/03/2017 à 03:08, Vítor De Araújo a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> I'm relatively new to Guile and new to this list, but I saw this
> thread in the archives and I'd like to make some comments.

Welcome!

>
> First, I think it would be nice to have a Guile wiki, in the likes of
> cliki.net. A publicly-editable reference place where people can share
> knowledge about Guile and Guile libraries and projects.
I agree.
> Sure, having a
> centralized package manager/repository would be nice, but just having
> a common place where people can look up what libraries exist and where
> they can be downloaded would be nice. (I don't know how easy would it
> be to set up a wiki at the Guile website.)

The current most comprehensive list of GNU Guile package is
available at http://sph.mn/content/3e73

There is also the github org:

https://github.com/guildhall

> On the topic of package management, I think that, more important than
> a central repository, is a standard format in which to distribute
> packages for easy installation.
I agree. The standard could be to have a tarball named using
semantic versionning, from which one can extract the PACKAGE-NAME.
Inside the tarball, the package manager will expect a PACKAGE-NAME.scm
or a PACKAGE-NAME directory which can be installed into ~/.local/lib/guile

WDYT?

> I've never used guildhall, and I guess
> it defines something like this,
Probably but it's not documented.

> but I think just having an
> installation command where you can pass the URL of a package to
> download and install (say, guild install http://some.url/somepackage.zip,
> or even a git URL)
This will still require the user to set GUILE_LOAD_PATH. Maybe we can
add ~/.local/lib/guile/ to the default GUILE_LOAD_PATH to make things
easier.

A simple guild install https://url/to/patch can be done in mater of hours
(if not minutes).

WDYT?

> would already go a long way towards making it
> easier for people to use third-party libraries in Guile.
I agree.
> (Or maybe package _names_ could be URLs pointing to an index in a
> well-defined format, which tells how to download each version of a
> package; then we could have even dependency management without a
> central repository. I'm pipe-dreaming here, though.)
This seems fun, but at the same time odd.

FWIW, I've started a new effort to build a package manager for GNU
Guile. You can find a demo at http://guildhall.hypermove.net/

It started as a guildhall web frontend but I noticed that guildhall:

1) doesn't work with guile 2.2 and I can not make it work
2) The solver is too complicated, even if it's based on aptitude algorithm
   it's still complicated.
3) use a lot of other scheme libraries [0] (like foof-loop) which
   doesn't help noobs like me to dive into the code. Maybe those
   libraries are *very* neat but why not include them in Guile proper
   then and make them default.

[0] https://github.com/ijp/guildhall/tree/master/guildhall/ext

For all this reasons I forked the effort.

I address each previous point as follow:

1) I only use guile 2.2, right now guile 2.1 is not supported. I think it's
bad this should be addressed at some point. AFAIR the issue is in
guile-wiredtiger (or it's an issue with setlocale (anyway this must be
addressed)))

2) I use a logic programming library called minikanren to solve the
dependency problem. This is the first real problem I can use minikanren
to solve a problem that is craft. This is the logic programming
library in scheme. While it's not very advanced compared to core.logic,
the version I use called microkaren has a straight forward 
implementation that can
hold all at once in a single head. Logic programming, like probabilistic
programming (cf. ) are two research areas in programming languages
that could improve the way we craft algorithms today. The logic approach
being more useful to me (but someone doing machine learning stuff,
might find the probabilistic scheme very useful. Ask me for a link!). 
OpenCog
does have a logic language embedded in it's language in their hyper 
graph database
(AFAIU it works using backward / forward inference but implements on top
of it higher logic constructs, like abduction, anaphora resolution...). It's
something they call PLN as Probabilistic Logic Network. AFAIK it's some kind
of probabilistic Datalog (which is one of the API Datomic support). 
There is
also probabilistic minikanren (albeit not useable). So, to sum up (because
I can (because I am not a robot)):

programming language research + guile + logic = minikanren.

Mind the fact that there is also a guile-log. But I still don't get what
guile-log does (hints: http://c-lambda.se/) whereas I understand how
microkanren does its stuff (I still need to benchmark it).

3) I don't use foof-loop but I bring my own dependencies. I use my
own database library that is based on wiredtiger. I've been working
on this database library for 3 years, it's well documented and various
example codes. That said, AFAIK, I am the only one to use it. I've built
a clone of Datomic (with the persistence part, patch welcome) which
use a query engine similar to Datomic I guess based on minikanren.

It's performance on a middle end laptop run Guile 2.2 are the followings:

- 1500 document reads per seconds
- 1000 to 500 document write per second

Documents are scheme assoc, and those are inserted 1000 per 1000 and
read 1000 per 1000 until it reach 50Go of data. At that point writes 
take 1/500
seconds or 0.002 seconds.

The biggest dataset I *loaded* into that database is wikidata which is 
50Go, I
don't remember how much time it takes to load it.

I had issues with wiredtiger using the Python bindings but only during reads
over a gigantic dataset of 60Giga. I say gigantic for a blog  not for Google
scale. Also upstream can solve issues if we can have a way to reproduce the
issues (which I plan to do once guile 2.2 is out (which means I will 
redo the
benchmarks against wikidata and read/write)). I understand the problem
that wiredtiger being part of MongoDB is problematic as MongoDB might not
care much for the same problem as ours. They will always be interested by
bigger free software database, tho. As it make free publicity of how 
successful
is their software.

Also there is much documentation about this library. I created several 
Guile projects
using it (albeit not big) they document several layers of the library 
and one
Guile user reported using it for doing human/social science research.

Search for guile wiredtiger in you favorite duckduckgo search engine.

Some people claim that PostgreSQL has all the required feature that 
someone wants
to store data and that this mongodb/wiredtiger is a bad. I recognize 
that wiredtiger
can be poor man's database right now. I don't have the required 
expertise to verify
whether it's good enough for your usecase. PostgreSQL is used in 
"production" in
all the world using multiple workload and stuff. PostgreSQL is good.

1) There is no dynamic ffi bindings for PostgreSQL yet, otherwise said you
     can't use pgsql from Guile RIGHT NOW.
2) wiredtiger is GOOD enough, benchmark it before saying it's not good 
ENOUGH.
3) it's not SQL, it's Schemey! It's inspired from datomic which the goto 
database
     for clojure with multiple implementation in the browser. This is 
killer feature
     of the clojure ecosystem that is closed source.
4) I find it more funny to fiddle with logic programming that set pseudo 
theory of SQL.
5) The first thing I do when pgsql bindings will be out, is to port 
feature space to PostgreSQL
and compare both pgsql and wiredtiger.
6) wiredtiger will always be simpler to use that Postgresql it's like 
comparing sqlite
and Datomic.

What happens next? You choose to hack on this project and find something 
interesting in this
TODO list:

- fix guile-wiredtiger to work on guile 2.0

- make it possible in guile-wiredtiger to stream the results of a look 
up using traversi using multiple cursors

- implement disequality in microkanren (for implementing the package 
dependency resolver
   and for fun because logic is awesome).

- implement a pastebin service using GNU Guile, yes because I think this 
a good bad reason to start
   another simple project that is not a static blog generator.

- Port the wiki of http://culturia.one to use feature space library.

- implement or find a scheme library that does the diff two lists (to 
finish wiki implementation
   and for the package dependency resolver).

- Help Matt Wette to complete his ffi helper 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-user/2017-03/msg00085.html
   (because we will need it for guix).

- add guile-fibers as a submodule and use it

- there is also a simple boolean keyword search engine that must be 
ported to feature space

- find the code that implements trigram transderivational search and put 
it in the repository. Bridging
   the gap with tsearch2.

- index the wiki

- index the packages

- index the pastebin

- index the web

And add gnunet to the mix.

There is not a lot of get-together pure guile project out there. There 
is guix. I hope this new project
can be the occasion for new guilers to submit patches or ideas.

The code is currently hosted at 
https://framagit.org/a-guile-mind/culturia.one/tree/guildhall/

The codename is "primary".

Also I'd like to point out, that I don't need primary. I do it for the 
community only. The
road is fascinating, tho. I could make mistakes so please input your 
feedback if you want
to use a tool like that.

You can:

guix package -i wiredtiger
git clone https://framagit.org/a-guile-mind/culturia.one.git
git checkout guildhall
emacs culturia.one/src/webui.scm

or

cd culturia.one/src/ && guile -L . webui.scm