On 3 July 2010 00:36, <ri...@happyleptic.org> wrote: > Hi list ! > > At work, I recently pushed the idea to use an extention language for our > main product, which is a middle sized program written in C with many > threads, that must run quickly without without interruption 24/7, and > that have little memory nor CPU to spare. [...] > The first usage for this extention language would be to replace the > various configuration system with a simpler and more powerfull interface > from scheme to C configuration datas. But I just came across Andy's > slides for ghm 2009, where he says that guile is "not so much for config > files (days of fvwmrc long gone)". > > What does he mean by that ? Are there any contraindication against using > guile as an extention language for configuration ?
I dunno quite what he meant, except perhaps to notice that there are now a (large?) variety of open-source packages that support configuration. So, for example, there's gnome's gconf, which has many advanced features, e.g. allows you to define a system-wide default config, which individual users can over-ride; you can define allowed config paramters (i.e. specify allowed ranges, values, etc), there are some generic graphical tools for exploring/ editing these, and the C api is nearly trivial to use. etc. Its hard to compete with that. I don't recall if gconf is GPL or LGPL. gconf is C, but I presume that KDE has some C++ variant; and there are probably others. Personally, I have found guile best-suited for "rapid proto-typing" i.e. coding up funky algos to drive various components in certain ways. Although "proto-typing" is a misnomer; I have no intent of ever re-writing the good algos in C. If anything, the opposite is true: I'm very very slowly converting large, bulky, clunky C code into small and fast guile code. --linas
