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Comment by amirouche | Hacker News Reader

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amirouche

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 by far Python and Ruby OO systems.

6) Guile is optimised for immutability which makes it for safer code.

7) Guile has Guix which has 'guix pack' command which is awesome cf. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/doc/guix.texi...

8) Guile has a lot of supporters cf. https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-user

9) Guile has awesome maintainers

Also, there is not a lot of packages. But programs written in Guile or using Guile tend to be of higher quality, cf. http://guildhall.hypermove.net/ and http://sph.mn/content/3e73

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> 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 infrastructure provider for open source software, but nowadays is one hosting option among many, and not a particularly attractive one.

GNU has never helped much in developing software, the individual projects always stood and fell with their maintainers. So it seems to me that nowadays people put their projects under the GNU umbrella mainly because they buy into a particular worldview of how software should be licensed.

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

I'm not a participant in the GNU project, but, as I see it, the most important thing about GNU is that they actually have ethics and culture, and that's what keeps the project relevant for decades. They hold to their principles and are able to follow their own way without succumbing to pop culture of the modern IT.

So yes, being part of the GNU project is probably more of a cultural thing than an immediate practical advantage.

On the other hand, the GNU project tries to build a coherent operating system, which means that Guile, being part of GNU, is the preferred choice of the extension language for other GNU projects. This makes it very likely for Guile to stay relevant for a long time.

Many of these would apply to most if not all scheme implementations though. I'm genuinely curious if there are use cases that set Guile apart from, say, Chez Scheme.

EDIT: Given that the original question appeared to imply "relevant as compared to other schemes"

I was implying that yes. Or even more so, relevant to other Lisps.

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.

Interesting

What does "cf." mean?

It means compare. So typically you'd use it to give a contrasting example. In this case it seems to be (mis)used to mean 'see' though.

In this case it seems to mean viz. or e.g.

Cf. is an abbreviation of "confer" which is Latin for compare and is used to introduce material that should be compared to assertions made previously.

Viz. is an abbreviation of "vidilcet" which is Latin for "namely" or "as follows" and is used to indicate a more complete statement or example of something that has just been asserted, whereas e.g. precedes examples that illustrate a point.

Viz. and cf. are often confused, as in this case.

I don't think "viz." is correct here, either, which isn't surprising given the total absence of hyperlinks in the Latin corpus. A plain "see" would be best.

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