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Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se> writes: > We seem to be in a quite paradoxical situation: > > On one hand, the current Guile is a very good Scheme interpreter. It > is stable and reasonably free of bugs. It has a lot of functionality > and is easy to integrate in application programs. > > And my guess is that it is one of the very few fastest Scheme > interpreters that currently exist. (My guess is still that it is the > second fastest after SCM.) > > But we have two problems which make Guile look really lousy: > > 1. Documentation is not completed. > > Even though functionality and solutions to most problems exist, few > know how to use it. > > 2. Guile startup time is ridiculously long. > > In the recent scripting benchmarks in comp.lang.scheme, Guile gets > lousy figures, probably because of the startup time. > Well, not a humongous improvment, but the current thing snapshot I have up (http://home.thezone.net/~gharvey/guile/thing.0.04.tar.bz2) starts up about twice as fast as the current cvs guile, by moving a lot from boot(-9).scm into the relevent c files and using Gary Houston's new ports code (and a somewhat faster gc). I haven't looked at the modules bits yet, mainly because there's only so much you can do (and I really want to have a gengc to play with by April ;). > I don't have time to work on this, but here are two suggested remedies: > > 1. Is it possible to give more people write access to the module > guile-doc? I understand why it is important to restrict write > access to the code sources, but I think it would be OK to let a > wider range of people access the manual. After the discussion that started up about documentation (when I brought up the projects list), I've been meaning to try and get something coordinated in this regard (but again, with projects software [which I hope some other suck^H^H^H^H person will take up ;')] and the gc, it would be stupid for me to offer to help coordinate this)... basically, something like the quick documentation I have up, but in texinfo bite-sized pieces for each source file; this wouldn't make for a perfect manual (though it does make for a decent reference manual... I've found the bits I've documented so far invaluable when writing actual code), but would make writing a full manual more a job of finding appropriate examples and putting the pieces together coherently, which is doable by one person... documenting all of guile, on the other hand, is probably not feasible for a single person doing this on their spare time (well, it is, but it will take quite a while). -- Greg