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guile as applications language


I've been thinking very seriously of Guile Scheme as an applications
language -- one language for both ``development'' and ``extension,''
reflecting a belief that extension is just distributed development.

This recent talk reasserting the role of Guile as purely an extension
language for apps otherwise written in C has made me have second
thoughtss about trying to do serious app development in Guile. :)

I think Guile is actually quite close to being a serious application
development language, and one that would tend to result in nicely
extensible apps.  Emacs has long been a model for extensible software,
and I've found Emacs Lisp and its programming tools such as the Lisp
Interaction mode and Edebug to be a surprisingly productive platform for
apps work.  Of course Emacs Lisp has several major shortcomings as an
applications language, since it wasn't designed to be one, and I see
Guile addressing those shortcomings by having:

  * Lots of Guile instances in small native OS processes/tasks, rather
    than one large monolithic process.

  * Faster execution, perhaps with a compiler.

  * Dynamic-linking of native code modules for those few things that
    really should be written in C or that are already written in C
    (e.g., low-level system interfacing, high-performance graphics
    libraries, legacy code libraries).

  * Good libraries for things such as parsing HTML and XML, Web
    spidering, full-featured GUI programming (e.g., GTK+, GtkHtml, Gnome
    Canvas), CGI, fast Apache integration, database integration, etc.

  * Some language improvements, such as lexical scoping, module system, etc.

  * Standard, easy-to-use, sufficiently-fast interprocess communication
    mechanism, or distributed object system.  (OK, this is a wishlist
    item.)

  * Standard and fast object system for OO programming.

Please note that this is just what I as one programmer would like to see
from Guile; I couldn't presume to say what is the best role for Guile in
the broad GNU Project.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Neil

P.S., If Guile does turn into an applications language soon, my own
      contribution would probably be in the form of libraries for
      Web-related things and such.

-- 
                                          Neil W. Van Dyke <nwv@acm.org>
                                          http://www.media.mit.edu/~nwv/

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