GUILE projects (was Re: I resign as Guile maintainer)

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar at free-expression dot org>]

On 1 Dec 1999, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> Well, on top of that, I now think that before getting GOOPS right, we
> need a compiler framework that can do expensive optimizations.
> 
> Aynway, as I said somewhere else, Guile is not yet ready to be
> maintained, it still needs to be developed and designed. (If it is to
> be continued, that is.)  This needs the undivided attention of some
> hackers that can look beyond C++, Java, Perl etc.  They might be hard
> to find.

     Well, I for one would be interested in working on a compiler
front-end to gcc and modifications to the gcc internals to provide support
for stackless tail-recursion and the like.  I believe my work on a
decompiler will help me for this.  It might be a while before I can
dedicate any real time to this, but I definitely want to use GUILE (or,
rather, the standard GNU extension language, as long as it's Scheme based)
for a long-term project I'm working on, which will require some
fundamental improvements (IMHO, like the ability to use different garbage
collectors as long as they conform to some given API, and the ability to
have multiple interpreter instances in multi-threaded code that don't
interfere with each other).   I see having interactive and efficient
control over the "application" (for lack of a better term) as a very
important component of the overall project (a streaming media system
that's got a certain emacs quality to it - i.e. completely interactively
programmable).
   Anyway, put me on the list of people willing to work on a Scheme front
end for gcc.  However, someone will need to detail everything necessary
for binary compatibility with the interpreter.

   Also, while looking at the Slib documentation, I notice Scm is now R5RS
compliant, whereas GUILE is not.  Any chance of updating the scm base of
guile to a more recent version?

Lynn