Hi Ian, On 25 Mar 2013, at 13:24, Ian Price <ianpric...@googlemail.com> wrote: > "Gary V. Vaughan" <g...@gnu.org> writes: >> I think we are misunderstanding one another somewhere :( >> >> I'm talking about this: >> >> 1. user writes some Guile Scheme, and feeds it to Lua Zile >> 2. Lua Zile runs zlc to translate Guile Scheme to Lua >> 3. Lua Zile runs luac to compile output of (2) to Lua bytecodes, and >> saves the result to disk >> 4. Lua runtime executes file of Lua bytecodes. >> >> I really don't see how Tree-IL fits in here, or makes loading and executing >> Guile >> Scheme sources from Lua Zile any easier. >> >> What am I missing? > > Two observations: > > 1. The frequent references to Guile Scheme (as opposed to just Scheme) > imply that Guile compatibility is desirable. > > 2. The most compatible Scheme implementation with Guile is, quite > obviously, Guile. > > So, then, my advice is quite simply to maximise the use of Guile, and > minimise the use of new code when writing this Guile-Scheme->Lua > compiler. > > Since Guile is written as a hierarchy of translators, you don't need to > implement Scheme per se, but can instead implement one of the languages > to which we can compile Scheme already, and ask Guile to compile Scheme > to that for you. > > e.g. guild compile foo.scm --to=tree-il --output=foo.tree-il > > Tree-IL is the "default" option, as it is relatively close to Scheme, > but you won't have to deal with things like hygienic macro > expansion. However, you can pick whichever one you find easiest to > translate to Lua or Lua Bytecode. > > I actually intend to follow a similar approach with a > guile-in-the-browser project I would like to write, however, I am > probably going to implement a vm, and have it interpret Guile's assembly > language directly. > > I'm not sure I can be clearer than that. If it wasn't enough, well, just > pretend I didn't say anything :)
Okay, the penny has finally dropped. And that does look like a more compatible approach, so I will certainly experiment with it, when I reach this item on my TODO list :) Thank's for your patience! Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)
