Hello, I have started to look at guile-vm. It's interesting -- the C code is among some of the best-looking that I have ever seen, the documentation is pretty OK, but there are some aspects of the middle bits that are odd.
One strangeness is that guile-vm actually is written in dialect of guile that understands things like (+ foo.bar 4) and (set! qux.frob.boz 3). This is implemented with the `expand-dot!' syntax transformer in (system bsae syntax). I think it would be a good idea to start moving this towards more standard guile, not least because we need the module-transformer for (ice-9 syncase). So on my branch: http://wingolog.org/git/guile-vm.git I have started to redo the syntax transformer. But this raises the question about what to use for compound data types. Keisuke also rolls his own define-record, and the dot syntax is linked with that. Ideally we would want to some more standard compound data type infrastructure. We could replace it with srfi-9 records. However I see that there is a failing compilation test for srfi-9 records in the test suite, apparently there intentionally, because there is some problem involving compilation phases, modules, and macro expansion: essentially, the things that Flatt's paper solves. We will certainly need to fix that. I see that there is some motion that way. But: until then, bringing in SRFI-9 records would break the self-compilability of guile-vm. So another option would be to expand guile-vm to use GOOPS for its compound record types. I think this is quite a good idea in the medium term. But probably we shouldn't do it until we excise the use of procedure->memoizing-macro inside GOOPS. I guess that since GOOPS does some compilation itself, we should have a stable VM that works well with macros before retargetting GOOPS's compilation efforts to the VM. My proposal, then, is this: let's break guile-vm's self-compilability for now, rebasing it on top of standard srfi-9 records. Then, rewrite the dot-syntax stuff to use record accessors. Then I can start to think about other things. I'll be hacking on this, but I write for comment. Andy ps. There is a third possibility, regarding records: use Guile's procedural make-record-type and friends. -- http://wingolog.org/
