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GNU Guile 3.0

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Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#21

Post by bjoli »

yepguy wrote: post #18
bjoli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guile runs elisp just fine, although there are quite some low hanging optimization fruit to be picked. From the Emacs side I strongly doubt it will happen. The discussions that have been going on for faaaar less intrusive changes is staggering. Reading the discussions about the portable dumper (new in the upcoming emacs 27, proposed in 2014) is a nice 4 hours. That was in just about every measurable way a step forwar…

I think it could potentially happen by way of a fork, similar to the history of GCC and EGCS, but it would take a dedicated group of hackers to make it happen. Not one guy doing all the work and a bunch of Guile fans on the sidelines cheering for him.

I agree! I am not that guy though, since I know enough C to understand I could never contribute anything useful to emacs :D

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#22

Post by JNRowe »

nrclark wrote: post #13

Excited by the new release. I learned a little bit of Guile for scripting in Make, and I dig it. It's a little hard to include in my own designs though, as much as I'd like to do it. If I had a wish-list, it would be: - Make some of the dependencies (especially libgc) internal. - Reduce the installed size. - Consider adding a license exception that allows using Guile without inheriting GPLv3's Installation Instructio…

> [make guile extensions]

Just a note from someone who was bitten by GNU make and guile integration last year. Huge numbers of systems have old make versions with no support for guile extensions¹, and many systems that do have new enough releases require a separate package² to use it.

And yeah, I'd written all my fancy integrations before figuring out they'd be worthless :/ It did allow me to noodle over the build system for long enough to come with some real improvements though, so it wasn't all wasted.

1. Some presumably to stay on pre-GPL3 make

2. make-guile on Debian for example.

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#23

Post by lloda »

chrisseaton wrote: post #16
levosmetalo wrote: post #10

The only reason Guile still exists is the stubbornes of GNU project to accept better alternative solutions over the course of time and push their own as the only true.

I don't really know where you're coming from - Guile is a leading implementation of Scheme. It's valuable by itself.

I've been a Guile user since 2001 or 2002 and all these years it's been a workhorse for me. Even before there was a compiler or before the compiler started getting better, Guile was a solid choice for embedding. Each of the alternatives had issues.

Now that Scheme runs faster I get to write more Scheme and less C and I couldn't be happier.

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#24

Post by samth »

rgrau wrote: post #6
jhoechtl wrote: post #5

Isn't Guile VM the VM behind Racket?

Racket team are in the process of migrating to Chez, not Guile.

This is correct, however much of the work we've done to make Racket work using the Chez VM could be re-used to build a Guile-backed version of Racket. It's not clear whether that would be of significant value, but it's doable.

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#26

Post by sigjuice »

jdormit wrote: post #19
jammygit wrote: post #17

Is guile a good choice for going through SICP one day?

Yes. You will be able to recreate the examples and problems exactly as they are written using Guile (or any other R6RS-compliant Scheme).

What about things that are not part of R6RS like the picture language or parallel-execute?

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#27

Post by nrclark »

JNRowe wrote: post #22
nrclark wrote: post #13

Excited by the new release. I learned a little bit of Guile for scripting in Make, and I dig it. It's a little hard to include in my own designs though, as much as I'd like to do it. If I had a wish-list, it would be: - Make some of the dependencies (especially libgc) internal. - Reduce the installed size. - Consider adding a license exception that allows using Guile without inheriting GPLv3's Installation Instructio…

> [make guile extensions] Just a note from someone who was bitten by GNU make and guile integration last year. Huge numbers of systems have old make versions with no support for guile extensions¹, and many systems that do have new enough releases require a separate package² to use it. And yeah, I'd written all my fancy integrations before figuring out they'd be worthless :/ It did allow me to noodle over the build sy…

I had the same experience. I think the slow adoption of Make's Guile extension is precisely because of its larger dependency load. If Guile had the same set of dependencies as GNU Make, I bet we'd see more distros turn it on by default.

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#28

Post by eeh »

If you've ever felt a sense of flexibility and freedom writing JS... Scheme takes it one step further. Guile is a great, well documented Scheme implementation.

I prefer typing and less flexibility on larger projects, but Guile is my go-to for for small/medium programs.

Great to see good work being done on this.

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#29

Post by emmanueloga_ »

I feel like the single most important reason Guile is not more popular is the focus on Linux. It is not even as easy to install it on Mac, afaict.

I've seen unofficial binary builds for windows but they are hard to find... and probably they use cygwin?

I wish Guile was readily available in other platforms (I wish their downloads page looked like this [1]...), but I'm guessing the main reason it is not is more philosophical than practical.

1: http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html

Re: GNU Guile 3.0

#30

Post by bjoli »

samth wrote: post #24
rgrau wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racket team are in the process of migrating to Chez, not Guile.

This is correct, however much of the work we've done to make Racket work using the Chez VM could be re-used to build a Guile-backed version of Racket. It's not clear whether that would be of significant value, but it's doable.

Andy has, tongue in cheek, said he wants to beat chez :)
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