Re: Guix Without Scheme

[Csepp]

jgart <jgart@dismail.de> writes:

> Hi Guixers,
>
> I just wanted to share this presentation that Singpolyma gave titled "Guix 
> Without Scheme":
>
> https://archive.org/details/singpolyma-guix-without-scheme
>
> Through the course of the presentation, singpolyma demos how to build
> a Guix package with javascript as well as lua.
>
> What do people think of leveraging Guile's compiler tower to write Guix
> packages in lua, javascript, python, and other languages? 
>
> nix perhaps? Might be meta fun to write a Guix package in a guile implemented 
> nix frontend.
>
> Maybe we should think of Scheme as just one frontend among many to Guile's 
> compiler tower?
>
> Is it a future goal for Guix to fully support this unique feature?
>
> all best,
>
> jgart

I like Lua but this doesn't seem to be a wise use of developer
resources.  Those languages have subtle differences that would surface
if this idea was pursued further.  The most obvious one: Scheme is very
permissive with what you can name your variables, while all the others
basically follow C's restrictions.  How would you map those names?  It
is not possible to create a bijection between sets of different
cardinality.  And then we haven't gotten into how the module systems are
different or how record systems aren't even standardized among Schemes.

If you want to experiment with mixing languages, Racket is likely a
better starting point.