Guile 2.0.2: Building the Guildhall | Hacker News Reader

Guile 2.0.2: Building the Guildhall

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54 pointswingo13 comments

By the time we have native compilation, I hope also our Elisp implementation will be significantly faster than the one in Emacs, so it will really become attractive to people to finish the work that we have done to make the switch there.

For an emacs user, that's pretty exciting.

I don't buy it.

Replacing Emacs elisp implementation is just looking for trouble. Although it is not the fastest one, the existing one works well enough and is battle tested and there are millions of lines of elisp code that would need to be tested, debugged and fixed.

If the goal is to allow to write parts of Emacs and extensions in some other language, I wander is Scheme really the best choice? Why not go all out and implement elisp in Common Lisp and use Common Lisp as a base for future Emacs and extensions development. There have already been such attempts, so it's not exactly something unheard of.

Common Lisp is huge, Scheme is small(ish nowadays), easier to learn, and as a consequence better suited as an embedded/scripting language.

If there was an actively-developed common lisp implementation that also ran elisp, I would be all for running emacs on that as well.

Emacs' sheer size (which you mentioned yourself) means you're not going to port it to a different language and have something comparably useful in less than a few years, assuming sustained interest and full-time development.

So, does 2.0 have up-arrow history and in general not freak out when I try to do stuff in interactive mode? Guile's great for what it's great at, but interactive dev. in the custom of Python or Gambit Scheme isn't one of those things, at least for me.

I think you just didn't enable readline. See:

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Readline....

Guile's REPL is among the best, I think. It's all documented here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Using-Gui...

But for real interactive development, you want Geiser:

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Using-Gui...

Oh wow thanks! Note to self: RTFRM.

Also, in the future if you need to get Readline capability and don't have time to RTFM, you can just wrap the command with rlwrap (`rlwrap guile`).

Waiting with excitement for this to get into Debian. Even testing is at version 1.8.

1.8 is years old. I suggest you grab 2.0.2 yourself if you want to see it anytime soon...

Waiting with excitement for this to get into Debian.

You're going to be excited for an extended period of time. I hope you've got a strong heart, for your sake.

They talk about ELF for storing byte code? Would that work on Windows/OSX?

(I guess it would, as much as Mono can load PE .NET files for OSX/Linux, after all these won't be loaded directly (it won't make much sense without the runtime anyway))

it's very straightforward to convert one header format to another of comparable (or greater) information-density, for the same processor.

ELF <-> PE is doable.

any debug format -> PE|ELF is doable (linking + stripping)

com|a.out -> PE|ELF is doable

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