Congratulations to the Guile team for the release! They're great people, and the Lua community is happy for having shared a devroom at FOSDEM with them for two years in a row.
GNU Guile 2.2.0
11–20 of 149 posts
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#12The mailing list announcement is better both for the detailed content and not being served as difficult to read on mobile "justified" text: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2017-03/msg00...
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Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#13Why are those brackets there in the syntax? What's the need? It looks hard to read when the programs are bigger. Is there any super advantage to it?
It is a Lisp thing. If you have an editor like emacs with Scheme support, it is possible to format in a way that makes it quite easy to read: in fact, the formatting reveals the AST.
A good explanation is in Chapter 1 of "SICP":
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.htm...
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#14For others looking for what Guile is:
"Guile is an implementation of the Scheme programming language."
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#15For me this is the most exciting part:
Complete Emacs-compatible Elisp implementation
Thanks to the work of Robin Templeton, Guile's Elisp implementation is now fully Emacs-compatible,
implementing all of Elisp's features and quirks in the same way as the editor we know and love.
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#16For me this is the most exciting part: Complete Emacs-compatible Elisp implementation Thanks to the work of Robin Templeton, Guile's Elisp implementation is now fully Emacs-compatible, implementing all of Elisp's features and quirks in the same way as the editor we know and love. This means we can finally have a proper GuileEmacs!
There’s still work to be done in pre-compiling the elisp in Guile Emacs to reduce the starttime (a lot).
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#17Why are those brackets there in the syntax? What's the need? It looks hard to read when the programs are bigger. Is there any super advantage to it?
Lisps take a couple months of programming in for it to start being easy to read if you're coming from only c-style languages, but it works out well in the long run. Sure makes refactoring a breeze.
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#18How does this stack up against all the other popular Lisp variants out there?
For Schemes, see http://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/benchmark.html — my takeaway:
- Performance: Guile 2.2.0 is halfways between the medium-speed Schemes and the high-performance Schemes. On par with Larceny, MIT, chicken and bigloo (and racket IIRC, but that’s missing in the benchmarks right now).
- Compatibility: Guile 2.2.0 is among the 10 most complete r7rs Schemes, missing only circular lists (the other failed task succeeds when allowing a longer task time).
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#19Why are those brackets there in the syntax? What's the need? It looks hard to read when the programs are bigger. Is there any super advantage to it?
One big advantage is that this unified recursive representation of code allows structural editing. With things like Emacs's paredit you manipulate code structure directly by splitting, joining, and moving subexpressions instead of editing code as flat lines of characters.
Btw, of modern Lisp dialects, I do not like Clojure for undermining this advantage by not syntactically grouping everything that is grouped semantically (e.g. binding pairs in let) just to use less parentheses. In my opinion, Scheme syntax (Guile is a Scheme implementation) is much better.
Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0
#20For those excited about the "Guile's Elisp implementation" in this release. The last major Guile release was 6 years ago, and much of this GuileEmacs work is still highly WIP and from my searching on emacs-devel seems to have stalled in 2015 for lack of volunteers.
Just because Guile implements Elisp the language doesn't mean there isn't a ton of work to be done on Emacs itself to swap out its native VM for Guile, and it seems nobody's keen on finishing up that work.