You’d think Guile would work. That sounds like a Guile checklist to be honest.

But that said, my random forays into Guile have been met with frustration. I can’t say anything specific, but for whatever reason, whenever I tried to use it, I’d get no momentum on my little project du jour, and I’d shelve it once again, moving on to something else.

Perhaps next time it’ll click.

JITed Guile is interesting, but Guile itself seems to live in a weird superposition state—it’s been around forever but there aren’t a lot of projects actually using it, so you’re stuck trying to figure out the best ways to, say, serve HTTP or set headers on requests.

I am a bit biased against GNU libraries. Maybe irrationally so, but I haven't had a good experience with them all the way down from Glibc. They have a tendency to be developer-hostile in very high-handed ways (sort of how GNOME treats its users). I wonder how many people still remember this piece of code:

    __asm__(".symver memcpy,memcpy@GLIBC_2.2.5");

Plus, the LGPL license will ensure that it can't be shipped on a multitude of platforms (iOS I believe, game consoles, etc.)

Last time I checked Guile it was somewhat hard to get working on Windows, build tooling was a classic autotools mess compared to Lua consisting of a few ANSI compatible C files.

Also Guile (and many other embeddable scripting languages) want to initialize global state which I'd prefer not to.