Re: using an SRFI that is not available in Guile

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name> skribis:

> when working on the (gnu services configuration) module, i would like
> to use srfi-189, which is not available in Guile
> (https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-189/srfi-189.html).

In addition to what Maxime wrote, I’d like to comment on the less
technical side of it.  I think it’s important to keep the code
consistent in terms of API usage.

There are often many different ways to do the same thing in Guile and
Scheme, but within Guix, settling on one (or two) ways for a given
things is preferable: it makes it easier for us all to understand and
maintain the code.

There’s no widespread “Maybe” idiom in Scheme; or rather, people use
TYPE | #f as a way to approximate “Maybe”.  It’s not ideal, primarily
because appropriate handling is not statically checked.  Yet, that’s
what we have and I’m not convinced adding SRFI-189 to the mix would
bring enough of an improvement to justify it.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.