Re: the future of Guile

[Julian Graham]

I've been frustrated with the situation, too.  Might I direct your
attention to the Snow project?  (http://snow.iro.umontreal.ca/)

One of the difficulties with these things is that they kind of require
a certain critical mass to establish themselves, and, so far,
nothing's really done that.  (SLIB, maybe?)  One thing that seems
apparent to me, though, is that any good packaging / library solution
is going to be cross-interpreter, so we should pay attention to what's
going on with PLT, Chicken, etc.


On Dec 5, 2007 10:40 AM, Mike Gran <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> > On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 10:01 +0100, Marco Maggi wrote:
>
> > > Pre-answer to all: the most important thing is to make clear
> > > what are  the priorities.  With a  "language for extensions"
> > > (LFE)   there  are  certain   priorities,  with   a  "Scheme
> > > implementation"  (SI) there are  others. I  fear that  if no
> > > choice is made Guile will be wiped out by other Schemes.
>
> As far as being an LFE, 1.8.x has been a big improvement over 1.6.
> The API is much cleaner when wrapping stuff by hand.
>
> > From: Roland Orre <address@hidden>
>
> > Today, however, I find that there are nearly no extension
> > libraries available for guile. As a shell scripting language
> > I prefer python because it has a very simple and clean
> > shell interface. To extend my applications beyond real number
> > crunching with e.g. graphical interphases (currently working
> > with xlib...) I feel a limitation and have more and more often
> > looked upon python where a lot of libraries are available for
> > GUI, database and you name it.
>
> One problem here is that there does need to be a richer library
> that is official and downloadable right from
> www.gnu.org/software/guile.  Unit test, documentation,
> cgi, http, sql, md5, utf8, xml, and perhaps pickle.
>
> Much has been done (GEE, Guile-lib, guile-gtk, all of TTN),
> but, each has its own packaging scheme, documentation
> scheme.  None of them are released in a coordinated manner
> with the Guile releases themselves.
>
> This goes back to the packaging problem.  After I've written a program,
> I'd like to give it away for others to use.  Giving code away in a scripting
> language should be easy.  It isn't easy here.
>
> First, dependencies on the many libraries are
> difficult to coordinate.
>
> Second, most non-trivial scripts require the whole of the configure,
> make, make install, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, %load-path overhead.
>
> Where is the analog of a Java jar file?
>
> Apologies if my rant has drifted off topic.