Re: rfc: next guile 1.8.x release

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi Massimiliano,

Thanks for the needs of TeXmacs this clearly.  A few comments below…

Massimiliano Gubinelli <m.gubinelli@gmail.com> skribis:

> all these three features point to weakness of various possible solutions
>
> 1) we do not need a Scheme with a lot of OS interfaces, this duplicate functionalities in QT and in our own code. For example all the OS interaction is dealt with internal functions (also because TeXmacs has its own virtual filesystem). We do not need threads, GMP, etc... all these additional parts add bloat without providing real useful functionalities.

Threads and bignums (GMP) were already in 1.8 though, and overall
libguile exposes about as much functionality today than in 1.8.  But I
can see that Qt and Guile are “competing” feature-wise.

> 2) it is better for us to have a Scheme which is not picky wrt. encodings. 

You can use binary output for when you just want to write bytes (info
"(guile) Binary I/O").

> 3) compiled schemes or schemes without first-class modules are more difficult to adapt to our own flavour of scheme coding.

I don’t think this is necessarily the case.  Probably you’ll want a
.scm -> .go rule in your makefiles, but that’s about it.

> Currently I'm trying three different routes:
>
> - embed S7 (which is fast, dynamic and minimal and works everywhere)
> - go for Guile 3 (I've still problems with phasing of macro expansion and bootstrap of our codebase. Will it work on Windows? Do we really need to carry on all the code we do not use?)
> - go for Chez Scheme (like for Guile 3 problems with compilation phases and bootstrap of our codebase. I'm more confident it will work on Windows and on new architecture, it is more compact than Guile, essentially only the compiler, I've still problems with the garbage collector at the level of C++ interface).

It’s much easier to port from Guile to Guile than from Guile to
something else.  :-)

The extra “code you don’t use” in Guile can be seen as a weight, but
longer-term, it could also change the way you approach problems in
TeXmacs and the way you structure it.

Guile 3 can be embedded just like Guile 1, but it supports a much
broader range of applications by being faster and providing more tools.

Ludo’.