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GNU Guile 2.2.0

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Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#131

Post by 59nadir »

microtherion wrote: post #126
amirouche wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0) Guile is a GNU project 1) Guile has no Global Interpreter Lock. 2) Guile is a scheme, so it is homo-iconic cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity 3) Scheme (and lisp in general) are nice to write Domain Specific Languages. 4) Guile doesn't have a particular overhead for calling simple functions which makes it possibly as fast as C. 5) Guile has a very powerful object oriented programming framework beating…

> 0) Guile is a GNU project Honest question: How does that help nowadays? Certainly in the early 90s, browsing the GNU ftp site was terrific for discovery, and in the 80s, GNU tapes were even more powerful, but nowadays, GNU seems to be irrelevant for discovery. I can't think of a single software project in the last 20 years that I've discovered through its GNU association. Similarly, GNU used to be important as an i…

I would actually love to hear what someone deeply involved in a GNU project thinks about this: What their big benefits are, etc..

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#132

Post by davexunit »

tree_of_item wrote: post #119
davexunit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go away, troll.

What? It's a serious question. It'd be great if a flagship GNU project was a serious competitor with other programming languages, but it honestly looks like Guile is being kept afloat by one or two people. Why is mentioning this trolling?

Sorry, but it seemed like you were trolling. Guile is not a one man show. I have been active in the Guile community for 5 years now, so I know. I will admit that the bus factor in the compiler portion of the code is high, driven almost exclusively by Andy, but he has done a significant amount of writing about how the compiler works and even listed several other improvements that can be done in an effort to get more people involved. I have no experience with compiler hacking and yet I was able to implement an optimization and get it into the 2.2 release. The commit history alone isn't enough to understand the group of people that push Guile forward.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#133

Post by sirn »

didibus wrote: post #52

Can anyone tell me if Guile is relevant? The list of example programs written in Guile is small. EmacsLisp and not Scheme seems to be the Gnu lisp of choice. The VM is not the fastest and not the most portable. Is there any driver behind it?

Part of Gnucash uses Guile, principally parts that related to reports. I'm Gnucash user myself, but don't know how large is Gnucash userbase though. Another example is GNU dmd, originally the init system for GNU/Hurd, is also written in Guile.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#134

Post by peatmoss »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #105
amirouche wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0) Guile is a GNU project 1) Guile has no Global Interpreter Lock. 2) Guile is a scheme, so it is homo-iconic cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity 3) Scheme (and lisp in general) are nice to write Domain Specific Languages. 4) Guile doesn't have a particular overhead for calling simple functions which makes it possibly as fast as C. 5) Guile has a very powerful object oriented programming framework beating…

Wait...I thought Guile was slow?

Slow compared to C? Yeah. Slow compared to other Scheme implementations like Chez Scheme? Yeah. Slow compared to Python or Ruby? No... something has changed with the computer language shootout site, but IIRC on most benchmarks Guile was middle of the pack for Scheme, which is to say quite a lot more performant than Python.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#135

Post by amirouche »

flukus wrote: post #111
davexunit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is relevant. For example, Guile powers an entire GNU/Linux distribution[0] where Guile is used for the init system, initial ram disk, and package manager. [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

That looks cool and/or terrifying. How does it go usability wise?

It's easier to declare packages recipes using guile than a mix of xml/bash/config files that other distro use.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#136

Post by amirouche »

tree_of_item wrote: post #96
davexunit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy is not the only one contributing to Guile. He does a ton, for sure, but Guile is far from a one man show. There are 2 other maintainers and many other contributors.

Take a look at https://www.openhub.net/p/guile/contributors/summary Are you saying this is inaccurate? Andy is far and away the top contributor, it's not even close. It really does seem to be a one man show.

It's almost acccurate, off by not much. There is a few contributions that don't appear here like guile-nash and guile-log which are respectively tracing JIT compiler and prolog in scheme runtime.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#138

Post by amirouche »

hackbinary wrote: post #82

How does Guile compare to Racket?

AFAIK+AFAIU Racket does have some specific kind of macros (ported to Guile but not in Guile distribution proper), There is guile-log that has no equivalent in Racket. Both support multiple language frontends but Racket seems to have more languages and in general Racket community seems bigger.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#139

Post by amirouche »

Slackwise wrote: post #30
ArneBab wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The super advantage of Lisp (including Scheme): Its format for defining data is the same as for writing code, making macros a natural part of the syntax: You can change your source code just like you’d change any other list (or rather tree) data type. However all this can be represented fully without parentheses — and this is possible with Guile using a reader extension without losing any of its power. This is realiz…

As a simpler solution, making brackets a lighter color so they don't stand out as much. Works really well.

I use rainbow-delimiter mode in emacs, it of great help.

Re: GNU Guile 2.2.0

#140

Post by appleflaxen »

microtherion wrote: post #58
avar wrote: post #20

For 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, an…

Given that Guile was basically launched by an RMS FUD attack on Tcl more than 20 years ago, 6 years seems like a rounding error. http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/

that's fantastic context; thanks for pointing this out.
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