Re: GNU Guile 3.0.5 released

[Massimiliano Gubinelli <m.gubinelli@gmail.com>]

Dear all,

Great news! Looking forward to work with this new release and dive a bit more into the internals of the compiler.

Can somebody give an update on the status of Guile 3 on Windows and Mac with M1 processors? Are these platforms supported or there are problems (e.g. with the JIT?). What are the plans after this release?

On my side I'm working slowly to a port of GNU TeXmacs to Guile 3. We have a working development branch but still there is much way to go, in particular to support separate compilation of the various modules (if ever this will be possible). Performance seems indeed better, I still have to come up with pertinent benchmarks to evaluate the tradeoffs of various choices (e.g. Guile 1.8 vs Guile 3.0 vs. S7 vs. ...). I've recently summarized in a blog post here:

https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/scheming.html <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/scheming.html>

the current situation as far as our project is concerned. 


Best regards,
Massimiliano


> On 7. Jan 2021, at 14:09, Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> We are delighted to announce GNU Guile release 3.0.5, the latest in the
> 3.0 stable release series.
> 
> Compared to the previous release in the 3.0 series, Guile 3.0.5 can
> compile chained "if" expressions into the equivalent of what a C
> compiler does with "switch".  It also adds some new warning passes.
> 
> Compared to the previous stable series (2.2.x), Guile 3.0 adds support
> for just-in-time native code generation, speeding up all Guile programs.
> See the NEWS extract at the end of the mail for full details.
> 
> 
> The Guile web page is located at http://gnu.org/software/guile/, and
> among other things, it contains a copy of the Guile manual and pointers
> to more resources.
> 
> Guile is an implementation of the Scheme programming language, packaged
> for use in a wide variety of environments.  In addition to implementing
> the R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS Scheme standards, Guile includes full access to
> POSIX system calls, networking support, multiple threads, dynamic
> linking, a foreign function call interface, powerful string processing,
> and HTTP client and server implementations.
> 
> Guile can run interactively, as a script interpreter, and as a Scheme
> compiler to VM bytecode.  It is also packaged as a library so that
> applications can easily incorporate a complete Scheme interpreter/VM.
> An application can use Guile as an extension language, a clean and
> powerful configuration language, or as multi-purpose "glue" to connect
> primitives provided by the application.  It is easy to call Scheme code
> from C code and vice versa.  Applications can add new functions, data
> types, control structures, and even syntax to Guile, to create a
> domain-specific language tailored to the task at hand.
> 
> Guile 3.0.5 can be installed in parallel with Guile 2.2.x; see
> http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Parallel-Installations.html.
> 
> A more detailed NEWS summary follows these details on how to get the
> Guile sources.
> 
> Here are the compressed sources:
>  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.5.tar.lz   (10MB)
>  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.5.tar.xz   (12MB)
>  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.5.tar.gz   (21MB)
> 
> Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
>  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.5.tar.lz.sig
>  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.5.tar.xz.sig
>  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-3.0.5.tar.gz.sig
> 
> Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
>  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
> 
> Here are the SHA256 checksums:
> 
>  a484eeffbd4d655b0c05b1382df8d40f1e561f7e71b963065762f6a6a497c675  guile-3.0.5.tar.lz
>  2d76fb023d2366126a5fac04704f9bd843846b80cccba6da5d752318b03350f1  guile-3.0.5.tar.xz
>  222046009a20b432ffa7c11b8d5a1d9ad0d8627be05cc1e8af612bc54ba2ea85  guile-3.0.5.tar.gz
> 
> [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
> .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
> and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:
> 
>  gpg --verify guile-3.0.5.tar.gz.sig
> 
> If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
> then run this command to import it:
> 
>  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 4FD4D288D445934E0A14F9A5A8803732E4436885
> 
> and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
> 
> This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
>  Autoconf 2.69
>  Automake 1.16.2
>  Libtool 2.4.6
>  Gnulib v0.1-1157-gb03f418
>  Makeinfo 6.7
> 
> An extract from NEWS follows.
> 
> 
> Changes in 3.0.5 (since 3.0.4)
> 
> * New interfaces and functionality
> 
> ** O(1) compilation of `case' and related expressions
> 
> Guile now optimizes chains of eq? comparisons to constants, resulting in
> O(1) dispatch time, regardless of the length of the chain.  This
> optimization is also unlocked in many cases for `match' expressions with
> many similar clauses whose first differentiator are constants.
> 
> ** New (ice-9 copy-tree) module
> 
> This module includes the `copy-tree' procedure that was previously
> implemented in C and present in the default `(guile)' module.  See
> "Copying" in the manual.
> 
> ** New warning: use-before-definition
> 
> This analysis, enabled at `-W1', issues warnings for programs that use
> top-level variables before they are defined.
> 
> ** New warning: non-idempotent-definition
> 
> This analysis, enabled at `-W1', issues warnings for programs that whose
> use of a variable is ambiguous.  For example, in the program:
> 
>  (define saved-add +)
>  (define + error)
> 
> The intention would seem to be to "save" the value of the base `+'
> procedure, then override it locally.  However if this program is ever
> loaded twice, then the second time it is loaded, `+' will be taken from
> the local binding instead of the import.  Users that want this kind of
> behavior should either use lexical bindings instead of top-level
> bindings, or otherwise rename important clobbered bindings via modules.
> 
> * New deprecations
> 
> ** `copy-tree' in the default environment, and `scm_copy_tree' from C
> 
> Import the `(ice-9 copy-tree)' module instead.
> 
> ** `unbound-variable-analysis`, `macro-use-before-definition-analysis`
> 
> These bindings from `(language tree-il analyze)' are replaced by the
> use-before-definition analysis, which powers a number of warnings.  Use
> `make-use-before-definition-analysis', but note that these interfaces
> are quite intimate parts of the compiler!
> 
> * Incompatible changes
> 
> ** `copy' read-option removed
> 
> This read option would include a copy of the source expression in the
> source-properties of each subexpression.  This option has always been
> off by default and lost most of its use value with the switch to a
> compiler in Guile 2.0.
>