Re: rfc: next guile 1.8.x release

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 12:36 PM Massimiliano Gubinelli <
m.gubinelli@gmail.com> wrote:


> Chibi is too slow


I'll just mention here that Chibi's file include/chibi/features.h has many
feature macros (at the C level) that can be changed to make Chibi
smaller/faster: for example, you could disable Unicode support, R7RS module
support, etc.  If you do that, rebuild, and re-benchmark, the results might
be more pleasant.  There would still be the issue of making whatever
changes are required to adapt the existing code to Chibi, of course.

> So Guile 1.8 today remains a very good piece of software,


I propose (and I think this would make the Guile team happier) that you
fork Guile 1.8.x into a new project with a new name (Canny Scheme, Foxy
Scheme, or Sneaky Scheme, perhaps?).  That way you can maintain it for
your own use, it will be easier for packagers to work with since it will
have its own version number sequence, and it will be available to others
who want small, fast, somewhat Guile-compatible code.

Whether this would be a GNU project or not would need to be resolved by the
powers that GNU, of course.

In my mind Guile 1.8 is a very different language than Guile 2/3


Agreed: a different dialect of Scheme should have its own name.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
C'est la` pourtant que se livre le sens du dire, de ce que, s'y conjuguant
le nyania qui bruit des sexes en compagnie, il supplee a ce qu'entre eux,
de rapport nyait pas.               --Jacques Lacan, "L'Etourdit"