

GNU Guile 2.0.7 released - jasox
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2012-11/msg00211.html

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markokocic
I remember reading a while ago about an initiative to switch Emacs elisp
implementation to use Guile backend. I haven't been watching that closely.

Does anyone have more information about the status of that project/initiative?

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jfb
It's dead. It never really got legs; similar projects are proposed pretty much
monthly on emacs-devel only to die quietly.

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mhd
Yeah, it's fighting with "Let's reimplement Emacs in Common Lisp" for most
often tried, yet ultimately unsuccessful project. I think there was a GSoC
project recently, but haven't heard anything about its results.

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tadfisher
There is Deuce [1], a project to port Emacs to Clojure. Specifically, the goal
is to port the C core entirely to Clojure and replace many redundancies with
JVM primitives; also, source-to-source transformation from Elisp to Clojure
allows the editor to interpret Elisp on the fly.

[1] <https://github.com/hraberg/deuce>

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jfb
The JVM seems like a really silly target for this. OH BOY! An editor that
won't behave correctly in ANY environment!

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tadfisher
You might have more experience in this area than I, but is this not the point
of the JVM?

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jfb
By targeting the JVM, you are giving up on a native user experience. Makes
perfect sense when the user interface of your software is programmatic;
insanity when you're trying to make software to be used by humans. Clojure is
a good lisp, but hardly reason enough to toss _all UI convention_ for. C +
Guile makes about a zillion times more sense.

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tadfisher
I disagree; you are not tied to Swing or any Java UI toolkit merely by using
Clojure on the JVM. You can just as easily integrate with a GTK, Cocoa, and
whatever Windows uses.

You'll notice how the current Emacs is weird on all three platforms by default
(at least they switched the scrollbar position). C/Guile isn't a panacea for a
UI frontend, they're entirely orthogonal.

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chris_wot
Ok, so I've heard about Guile, but never really paid it any attention. The
home page is interesting, but doesn't reference any newbie guides for people
like me.

They seem to have a JavaScript compiler front end, does this mean that by
implementing Guile in your program you could use js to enhance your app?

Next question: if you had a web based app, could you use Guile to extend the
site?

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noahl
Hi,

I contribute to Guile (in a very small way); I'm happy to answer whatever
questions I can about it.

You're right, I don't know of any newbie guides. If you already know Scheme,
you'll find Guile easy, but if you don't, you'll need to learn that. You might
be able to get started with the Guile manual, but that seems a little
difficult, because it's really for reference. SICP
(<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html>) is the classic way
to learn Scheme. If you're not interested in that, you can search for another
introduction to Scheme. There are plenty of them around. The real issue for
someone who knows how to program already is that Scheme is often used as a
teaching language, so a lot of the introductions will be very basic.

There is a JavaScript frontend, but I don't think it's finished yet. Yes, if
you embedded Guile in your program you could extend your program with JS, but
you might need to do some work on Guile's JavaScript implementation first.
Although even in its present state, it should be much, much easier to complete
Guile's implementation than to build your own; plus you'd get the benefit of
Guile's backend compiler work.

As for webapps, no, I don't think you could do what you're talking about. You
can certainly use Guile to write the backend to a web app, and in fact it has
a (web ...) series of modules for that, but you could do that with any other
language too. You can't use Guile in the frontend of a web app, because that
really depends on what browsers support. (Although it's possible you could use
Guile to compile Scheme to JavaScript, if you want to do that.)

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bitdiddle
The one true lisp.

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sigzero
"Guile is an implementation of the SCHEME programming language, with support
for many SRFIs, packaged for use in a wide variety of environments."

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markokocic
... and Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure and many others are just lisps.

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sigzero
Dialects of...sure. Definitely not "the one true lisp".

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bitdiddle
Well the one true lisp of course was given to us by Alonzo Church, that other
guy we rarely hear of :)

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flavoie
Is Guile only for GNU system? Can it be embedded in OSX, iOS or Android
application?

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dchest
The license is LGPLv3.

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Arelius
Last I checked, this prevents distribution in an App store (correct me if I'm
wrong) but there is nothing preventing you from using it on say OS X

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postfuturist
There's nothing in the LGPLv3 that prevents you from charging money, or
distributing through app stores, so long as you comply with the requirements
of the license.

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baldfat
The issue is App Stores with DRM do conflict with the license. Though I think
LGPL could be appeased by posting the code on a public website, but that might
actually be a conflict :)

Apple certainly has a strong policy against GPL and LGPL on their store since
it the store can not be compatible.

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musashibaka
I wonder why Guile isn't on Github's list of programming languages...

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ConstantineXVI
It's a Scheme, no?

<https://github.com/languages/Scheme>

