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Elk/Guile (Re: Bad news from the module/environment front)


> From: Telford Tendys <telford@eng.uts.edu.au>
>
> I've been looking at ``elk'' which is a very together scheme inplementation
> and available for Debian now.

I have also taken a look at Elk
(http://www-rn.informatik.uni-bremen.de/software/elk/)
and it seems really nice.  Startup time is not noticeable on my old
Iris (R4000,100MHz) while guile-1.3 takes about 12 seconds!!!
(((((by the way, on my machine the cvs-guile exits immediately like
  ortler[libguile] 21> guile
  ERROR: In procedure struct-ref:
  ERROR: Wrong type argument in position 2: 5.0
  ortler[libguile] 22> 
Does anybody know the reason straight away?)))))

As much as I understand Guile is based on SCM.  Is that correct?
Are there special reasons for not having based it on Elk which seems
to have precisely the same goals as Guile?

> The nice thing is that it also has a debugger that grabs the stack
> frames and allows you to walk through them, evaluate things at each
> stack level, inspect variables, whatever... all by using these peekholes
> into closures. I can't seem to get it to give a backtrace like guile
> does but it must be possible because you can trace through each frame
> by hand if you want to.

Is there a debugger for Elk?  I didn't find anything like that.  Also
the manual gives almost no hints.

> Strange that you don't mention elk in your list, maybe it is
> too new. However, it has a very focused target market -- application
> developers who want an easy way to tack an interpreted extension
> language onto their code. This is doubly dangerous to guile
> because elk has hooks into various X toolkits so the lazy coder
> can knock up widgetty front ends in elk while hanging some grunty
> C on the back end. Every function is documented too.

From what I have found on that WWW-page Elk is rather old
(there is a nice reference
  USENIX Computing Systems, vol. 7, no. 4, 1994
which one can get as
  http://www-rn.informatik.uni-bremen.de:80/software/elk/elk-3.0/doc/usenix/usenix.ps
from which it seems that it has been available already in 1989).

But I'm in doubt if they are still active at the moment.

Nico.

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