Teika Kazura <teika lavabit com> writes:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:16:23 +0100, Christopher Roy Bratusek wrote:
>> - begin collaboration with [Michal Maruška] about his thoughts about leaving REP.
>> [...]
>> (NOTE: this does not mean, that we'll do it, as of now.)
>
> First, let's remember that librep has many defects and no one can make
> real fix in any of them. It's better to move to some well-maintained
> but at the same time stable enough language. But I don't know if it's
> realistic. We're absolutely understaffed. How many work fulltime? (I
> don't mean 24/7.)
> On the other hand, transition to some lisp is easier, because code
> translation is sometimes straightforward, or at least, often easier.
>
> But to which lisp/scheme? I browsed the site of guile-gtk, and its
> development seems to be completely dead. (Guile itself is active.)
I really think targeting Guile 2.0 is the best choice. It looks like
the FSF is more or less backing a transition of Emacs to Guile, and
requested BT Templeton reapply for GSoC this summer to actually start
working on integration of the Elisp compiler for Guile into Emacs
itself.
When I suggested this last summer I did look into it, and it seems like
a feasible project. There are a few options:
- Replace the internal REP object representations with SMOBs and keep
the current bytecode interpreter and REP compiler
- Write a REP->TreeIL compiler (this is what elisp does) and either
port sawfish itself to libguile or write a librep compatibility shim
for registering types+functions+&c
The latter is more work and would probably result in some slow down
because the Guile compiler is fairly new and does not do much in the way
of optimization. Then again, perhaps not--now that a stable release of
Guile has been made with the VM it looks like work in that area is
starting.
Doing this REP and Scheme could more or less coexist. There would be a
number of advantages as well--gaining access to a large body of Scheme
extensions for one (e.g. I tried adding XDG-MENU support last fall, but
didn't get far because the rep xml parser was not up to the task).
> And let me repeat: it's a "who'll do it?" problem, less of "which lang?".
It turns out BT has been hacking on GWM--replacing its ancient Lisp
dialect with Guile and making it work with modern X11. I talked to em
about this, and ey seems amenable to working on writing a REP compiler
for Guile and updating Sawfish. Assuming ey is on board, I can commit
some time to this as well.
Is there a reasonable chance that if work were commenced on this it
would be merged?
--
Jessie: i thought your beard took the oxygen from the air and made it
breathable for you
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