Re: 2.2 git users should switch to stable-2.2 branch

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Andy Wingo writes:

> Hello Guilefolk,
>
> As we did with Guile 1.8 and 2.0, I just pushed a stable-2.2 branch.
> This is the branch for Guile 2.2 development -- the branch that keeps
> a stable API and ABI during the 2.2.x series.  It's the one you want to
> be using unless you are doing development of Guile itself.
>
> If you have a checkout of Guile master, probably right now you want to
> do this:
>
>   git fetch
>   git checkout stable-2.2
>
> Assuming your default remote is the Guile repo, that will fetch the new
> stable-2.2 branch from git.sv.gnu.org, and then the "checkout" command
> will check out a new branch locally to track upstream stable-2.2.
>
> As far as a roadmap goes... I suspect the next Guile stable series will
> be 3.0 and I suspect it will feature ahead-of-time compilation to
> machine code instead of bytecode.  I think there will still be a
> bytecode backend as well for targets that are missing the machine code
> backend.  Here are some thoughts:
>
>   https://wingolog.org/archives/2016/02/04/guile-compiler-tasks
>
> I will probably start within the next month or three on "instruction
> explosion"; see that blog post for details.  It's like Abdulaziz
> Ghoulum's "incremental approach to compiler development", except
> completely in reverse :P

This is really exciting!

> Farther on I would expect a 3.0 after about 2 years or so.  There are
> many things to do.  If someone is interested in taking a task, that blog
> post has many ideas that are still valid.

I hope, eventually, I will be in the right time and place to be helpful
on this.

> Incidentally if you use Guile commercially and would like to support my
> work on it, let me know.  My employer Igalia continues to be happy with
> me working on it a day or two a week, and I work on it as a hobby
> additionally, but it would be nice to be able to devote all of my
> attention on Guile, at least for consecutive periods of a month or two
> so I can work on whole features.  I expect a general perf improvement
> for Guile 3.0 of about 4x relative to Guile 2.2, and with support, this
> can become reality sooner.  There are lots of details of course but if
> this is something that interests you, let's talk.
>
> Happy hacking, and don't forget to switch your Guile git branches!
>
> Andy

I don't know what the right answer is to it (maybe eventually there
would be a company making money off of Guix deployment that can manage
to pay for full-time Guile work) but obviously this would be nice to see
happen.

Thank you for all your leadership and hacking in Guile-land!  We
love/appreciate it!