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Comment by emmanueloga_ | Hacker News Reader

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

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> It is not even as easy to install it on Mac

    brew install guile

That's a bottle though. I don't know if it's hard to build but it isn't hard to install.

Can't understand why a Lisp would be hard to build on a Mac or elsewhere. What are the dependencies besides some common C libraries (e.g. for math, unicode handling, etc)?

> Can't understand why a Lisp would be hard to build on a Mac or elsewhere.

Huge number of complex and extremely platform-specific dependencies and modules, like garbage collectors, foreign function interfaces, native code generators, etc, etc. All inherently very platform-specific, fragile, and dependent on specific tooling. Very much not plain C code.

I build Guile on the Mac regularly. I need to pass the paths to these 4 libraries to configure: libgmp, libunistring, libiconv, and libreadline. The libraries themselves I get from MacPorts. Then make check && make install. Doesn't look all that awful to me to be honest.

Doing it using libraries installed by homebrew is borderline impossible unless you write your own brew formula. I have up on trying to use deps from homebrew and went with macports, and voilà: worked flawlessly.

It is not unique to guile either. Compiling things on Mac os brings back memories from Redhat 8. I have had so much more luck with WSL or even cygwin than Mac os for at least a dozen open source apps.

I've tried to build it on Mac in the past (years ago). I spent hours fiddling with it, and finally gave up and ran brew install guile. It might be better now?

TBH, isnt this just how compiling things on Mac os is? Every single time it is voodoo-fighting ./configure and sed-ing makefiles.

I have built some other GNU packages without issue. In particular, I remember having easy success with CLISP. But at the same time, I have not needed to try to build a lot of packages, as many are available as pre-built binaries already.

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