Hi Massimiliano, Thanks for the needs of TeXmacs this clearly. A few comments below…
Massimiliano Gubinelli <m.gubine...@gmail.com> skribis: > all these three features point to weakness of various possible solutions > > 1) we do not need a Scheme with a lot of OS interfaces, this duplicate > functionalities in QT and in our own code. For example all the OS interaction > is dealt with internal functions (also because TeXmacs has its own virtual > filesystem). We do not need threads, GMP, etc... all these additional parts > add bloat without providing real useful functionalities. Threads and bignums (GMP) were already in 1.8 though, and overall libguile exposes about as much functionality today than in 1.8. But I can see that Qt and Guile are “competing” feature-wise. > 2) it is better for us to have a Scheme which is not picky wrt. encodings. You can use binary output for when you just want to write bytes (info "(guile) Binary I/O"). > 3) compiled schemes or schemes without first-class modules are more difficult > to adapt to our own flavour of scheme coding. I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Probably you’ll want a .scm -> .go rule in your makefiles, but that’s about it. > Currently I'm trying three different routes: > > - embed S7 (which is fast, dynamic and minimal and works everywhere) > - go for Guile 3 (I've still problems with phasing of macro expansion and > bootstrap of our codebase. Will it work on Windows? Do we really need to > carry on all the code we do not use?) > - go for Chez Scheme (like for Guile 3 problems with compilation phases and > bootstrap of our codebase. I'm more confident it will work on Windows and on > new architecture, it is more compact than Guile, essentially only the > compiler, I've still problems with the garbage collector at the level of C++ > interface). It’s much easier to port from Guile to Guile than from Guile to something else. :-) The extra “code you don’t use” in Guile can be seen as a weight, but longer-term, it could also change the way you approach problems in TeXmacs and the way you structure it. Guile 3 can be embedded just like Guile 1, but it supports a much broader range of applications by being faster and providing more tools. Ludo’.
