8 ms·

GNU Guile 2.1.4 released

113 points by rekado 10y ago

FlorianOver 10y ago
I really admire Andy Wingo for all his great work. Thank you and the guile team for the the outstanding results!
s_kilk 10y ago
Anyone here know of any "real" programs and projects using Guile? Would be curious to hear of any blazing success-stories.
- proaralyst 10y ago
  I know GDB uses it for plugins.
  - sigjuice 10y ago
    Do you know of any such plugins?
    - proaralyst 10y ago
      I don't, I'm afraid. I wouldn't be surprised to find the C++ pretty-printers were written in it, but I have no evidence for that.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        They use Python.
    - davexunit 10y ago
      Andy Wingo used it for his work on V8. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/v8-users/kIVoA7GZAcY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/v8-users/kIVoA7GZAcY
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    Although all the plugins I know of are in Python (including some GNU ones, like nice pretty printing of C++ standard library types from gcc)
- JohnStrange 10y ago
  GnuCash is written in C but uses Guile as an extension language.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Guix ? FSMVO "real"
  - davexunit 10y ago
    GNU Guix is part of the software deployment process for a pretty complicated speech recognition platform at the company I work for. Thus, I consider it real software.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Do you do fancy logic through Guix or is it "only" the build system ?
      - davexunit 10y ago
        Not sure what fancy logic you have in mind. It's a package manager so I have it build packages for me. I also use 'guix environment' as an RVM/Bundler replacement. Guix "just" builds the packages for me, but I am able to package things with much greater speed than with traditional package managers and the resulting binaries are bit-reproducible.
        agumonkey 10y ago
        Saying that using guix isn't exactly the same as using guile; even if Guix is a good lever to help your large project.
        davexunit 10y ago
        The project required writing plenty of Scheme code to describe the package recipes. A very non-trivial amount. Why are you so adamant to dismiss what I've done?
        agumonkey 10y ago
        It's both non negative[1] and non personal, just an intellectual distinction to avoid giving credit to the wrong object: a language or a tool written in this language. Hoping you're not offended anymore. [1] I am in no position to criticize anyone this way, and I wouldn't do it anyway.
- jay-anderson 10y ago
  Lilypond (http://lilypond.org/ http://lilypond.org/). Though since guile 2.0 there's been some friction between the lilypond developers and guile developers. Lilypond is still using guile 1.8. There are periodic threads on the lilypond mailing list asking what the hold up is (I don't recall the reasons at the moment). Edit: This looks to be the issue: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-06/msg00024.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-06/msg00...
  - tunesmith 10y ago
    I think the lack of guile 2.0 support was mentioned as one of the main blockers behind full MusicXML import/export support - this was a couple of years ago though, not sure if that's still true.
- sigjuice 10y ago
  Here is a brief list https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/#apps https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/#apps
- nrclark 10y ago
  GNU Make has a Guile scripting interface, although distros don't usually ship it compiled into their 'make' packages (for whatever reason). On Ubuntu/Debian, you can get it by installing 'make-guile' instead of 'make'.
- amirouche 10y ago
  There is no such big-ish projects using Guile outside projects embedding Guile and guix. There is no wordpress or even framework as powerful and easy to use as Django or Rails. There is no support for https, it's kind of a no-go if you want to access REST APIs from Guile. Cookie support is not good enough. That said, the creator of Artanis reported some success using Artanis in a commercial setting. Outside that there is various free projects in the work, look at Guile homepage or ask on #guile. On my side I am working on search engine named Culturia.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    >There is no support for https, it's kind of a no-go if you want to access REST APIs from Guile. That is not true. While Guile doesn't support HTTPS out-of-the-box, gnutls ships with Guile bindings. Guix is a notable user of those bindings.
    - armitron 10y ago
      It is preposterous to expect people to write their own HTTPS support on top of something as primitive as GnuTLS! This attitude towards practicality, if you will, that runs rampant in scheme-land is one of the major barriers for adoption. If you look at Common Lisp, these issues do not exist, the end result being a multitude of substantial real-world projects across a variety of domains (commercial, opensource, academia, industry and so on).
      - davexunit 10y ago
        Not so fast, there is an open bug report to move HTTPS support into Guile proper. The (non-trivial) work just needs to be done to make it happen. The Guile maintainers very much care about usability.
  - sidhu1f 10y ago
    The GNU Artanis[1] web framework seems interesting... [1] http://web-artanis.com http://web-artanis.com
amirouche 10y ago
This version of Guile makes possible better asynchronous code via https://github.com/wingo/fibers/wiki/Manual https://github.com/wingo/fibers/wiki/Manual (which is the implementation of something similar to Python's async/await)
rhabarba 10y ago
Still waiting for Guile Emacs.
- ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
  As of GSoC 2014, I believe Guile Emacs works with only some performance regressions (I believe due to overuse of dynamic scope?). In any case, you can run it today if you wanted to, just follow the process outlined on the wiki [0]. That said, I don't think the Emacs project has fully committed to porting over for various reasons, probably in part because running Guile on some platforms (Windows) is really difficult, and thus would be a problem for users. I'm sure the people in #guile on FreeNode could give a much more detailed answer though, I don't follow the Guile/Emacs thing so closely as I'm mostly a CHICKEN Scheme / Vim user. [0] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
  - davexunit 10y ago
    If you use GNU Guix, you can install it quite easily: guix package -i guile-emacs
  - rhabarba 10y ago
    It's not the language. I don't really like Scheme (I'm more a Common Lisp guy). I would, however, really love to see Emacs without the Emacs Lisp limitations because everything missing from Emacs - at least to me - is performance. Guile looks like a good way to work around that.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Vim? Really? Does vim implement the original vi's lisp mode? I hope it does. The original vi's lisp mode is something I have only seen traditional vi implement thus far, and it's pretty nice.
    - ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
      I actually do not know, as I tend to use slimv [0]. There's a lot of buzz lately around geiser [1] for Emacs, and few Scheme implementations provide a workable SLIME interface, but for the most part I get by. I don't miss too much, and don't see why everyone assumes Emacs is the only way to write lispy code (without a full blown IDE like Dr. Racket). Vim + paredit inside of tmux, with a proper REPL in another pane / window is a great workflow. Of course this requires some more plugins to Vim, but for the most part sending commands through tmux is pretty lightweight. [0] https://bitbucket.org/kovisoft/slimv https://bitbucket.org/kovisoft/slimv [1] http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/ http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Guile is my second favorite scheme (after chicken). It's semi-R6RS, but still feels nice, and still feels scheme-y. It's nicely practical, and it's one of the rare Scheme implementations to support pthreads. Also, it has a lot of good libraries (behind Racket and Chicken, but better than many schemes), and an FFI that's actually pretty nice, but encourages writing a wrapper around the library that's more than paper-thin. It also embeds well, with it and Chibi being pretty much the only game in town on Scheme embedding. I love it, just not as much as I love Chicken.
- na85 10y ago
  What is the scheme equivent of ANSI C or Common Lisp? By that I mean what is the default/main/vanilla scheme?
  - hood_syntax 10y ago
    Probably MIT Scheme, but afaik it's not suitable for production applications since it's a tool for teaching. It is the 'vanilla' Scheme though
    - bandrami 10y ago
      IIRC MIT is the only one that will actually run the SICP code out of the box.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        No, most of SICP should run in any scheme. Although a bit of it may be MIT specific.
      - sigjuice 10y ago
        I was able to work through the first three chapters using racket in Emacs, including the part dealing with pictures http://i.imgur.com/fwCUUZI.png http://i.imgur.com/fwCUUZI.png
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Frenchgeek 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iof5pRAIZmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iof5pRAIZmw ( Sorry )
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  Well, you're not wrong: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guiles-theme-goes-with-everything http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guiles-theme-goes-with-everyth...
AceJohnny2 10y ago
I need to check out Guile's suitability for embedability in applications. Traditional suggestions have been TCL, Python, and Lua. For Guile, the conversation always focuses on FSF and Emacs, but that's boring. Has anyone [other than FSF/Emacs] used it as an application extension language? If so, what's your experience? What's the overhead? memory usage? Ideally, I'd like to use it on embedded systems/firmware (as opposed to embedded in an PC application), but I'm assuming it's either too memory-intensive or requires too much platform support, and certainly the license won't fit :(
- shakna 10y ago
  Guile's lib you have to link against is 2.5mb, and much of the object code for any Scheme you end up compiling is 0.5-3mb. That was enough to get Guile disqualified from our project. I never managed to get it running on anything with less than 16mb of RAM, but that might have been my own C wrapper, YMMV.

113 points by rekado 10y ago

I really admire Andy Wingo for all his great work. Thank you and the guile team for the the outstanding results!

Anyone here know of any "real" programs and projects using Guile? Would be curious to hear of any blazing success-stories.

proaralyst 10y ago
I know GDB uses it for plugins.
- sigjuice 10y ago
  Do you know of any such plugins?
  - proaralyst 10y ago
    I don't, I'm afraid. I wouldn't be surprised to find the C++ pretty-printers were written in it, but I have no evidence for that.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      They use Python.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    Andy Wingo used it for his work on V8. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/v8-users/kIVoA7GZAcY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/v8-users/kIVoA7GZAcY
- CJefferson 10y ago
  Although all the plugins I know of are in Python (including some GNU ones, like nice pretty printing of C++ standard library types from gcc)
JohnStrange 10y ago
GnuCash is written in C but uses Guile as an extension language.
agumonkey 10y ago
Guix ? FSMVO "real"
- davexunit 10y ago
  GNU Guix is part of the software deployment process for a pretty complicated speech recognition platform at the company I work for. Thus, I consider it real software.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Do you do fancy logic through Guix or is it "only" the build system ?
    - davexunit 10y ago
      Not sure what fancy logic you have in mind. It's a package manager so I have it build packages for me. I also use 'guix environment' as an RVM/Bundler replacement. Guix "just" builds the packages for me, but I am able to package things with much greater speed than with traditional package managers and the resulting binaries are bit-reproducible.
      - agumonkey 10y ago
        Saying that using guix isn't exactly the same as using guile; even if Guix is a good lever to help your large project.
        davexunit 10y ago
        The project required writing plenty of Scheme code to describe the package recipes. A very non-trivial amount. Why are you so adamant to dismiss what I've done?
        agumonkey 10y ago
        It's both non negative[1] and non personal, just an intellectual distinction to avoid giving credit to the wrong object: a language or a tool written in this language. Hoping you're not offended anymore. [1] I am in no position to criticize anyone this way, and I wouldn't do it anyway.
jay-anderson 10y ago
Lilypond (http://lilypond.org/ http://lilypond.org/). Though since guile 2.0 there's been some friction between the lilypond developers and guile developers. Lilypond is still using guile 1.8. There are periodic threads on the lilypond mailing list asking what the hold up is (I don't recall the reasons at the moment). Edit: This looks to be the issue: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-06/msg00024.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-06/msg00...
- tunesmith 10y ago
  I think the lack of guile 2.0 support was mentioned as one of the main blockers behind full MusicXML import/export support - this was a couple of years ago though, not sure if that's still true.
sigjuice 10y ago
Here is a brief list https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/#apps https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/#apps
nrclark 10y ago
GNU Make has a Guile scripting interface, although distros don't usually ship it compiled into their 'make' packages (for whatever reason). On Ubuntu/Debian, you can get it by installing 'make-guile' instead of 'make'.
amirouche 10y ago
There is no such big-ish projects using Guile outside projects embedding Guile and guix. There is no wordpress or even framework as powerful and easy to use as Django or Rails. There is no support for https, it's kind of a no-go if you want to access REST APIs from Guile. Cookie support is not good enough. That said, the creator of Artanis reported some success using Artanis in a commercial setting. Outside that there is various free projects in the work, look at Guile homepage or ask on #guile. On my side I am working on search engine named Culturia.
- davexunit 10y ago
  >There is no support for https, it's kind of a no-go if you want to access REST APIs from Guile. That is not true. While Guile doesn't support HTTPS out-of-the-box, gnutls ships with Guile bindings. Guix is a notable user of those bindings.
  - armitron 10y ago
    It is preposterous to expect people to write their own HTTPS support on top of something as primitive as GnuTLS! This attitude towards practicality, if you will, that runs rampant in scheme-land is one of the major barriers for adoption. If you look at Common Lisp, these issues do not exist, the end result being a multitude of substantial real-world projects across a variety of domains (commercial, opensource, academia, industry and so on).
    - davexunit 10y ago
      Not so fast, there is an open bug report to move HTTPS support into Guile proper. The (non-trivial) work just needs to be done to make it happen. The Guile maintainers very much care about usability.
- sidhu1f 10y ago
  The GNU Artanis[1] web framework seems interesting... [1] http://web-artanis.com http://web-artanis.com

amirouche 10y ago

This version of Guile makes possible better asynchronous code via https://github.com/wingo/fibers/wiki/Manual https://github.com/wingo/fibers/wiki/Manual (which is the implementation of something similar to Python's async/await)

rhabarba 10y ago

Still waiting for Guile Emacs.

ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
As of GSoC 2014, I believe Guile Emacs works with only some performance regressions (I believe due to overuse of dynamic scope?). In any case, you can run it today if you wanted to, just follow the process outlined on the wiki [0]. That said, I don't think the Emacs project has fully committed to porting over for various reasons, probably in part because running Guile on some platforms (Windows) is really difficult, and thus would be a problem for users. I'm sure the people in #guile on FreeNode could give a much more detailed answer though, I don't follow the Guile/Emacs thing so closely as I'm mostly a CHICKEN Scheme / Vim user. [0] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
- davexunit 10y ago
  If you use GNU Guix, you can install it quite easily: guix package -i guile-emacs
- rhabarba 10y ago
  It's not the language. I don't really like Scheme (I'm more a Common Lisp guy). I would, however, really love to see Emacs without the Emacs Lisp limitations because everything missing from Emacs - at least to me - is performance. Guile looks like a good way to work around that.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Vim? Really? Does vim implement the original vi's lisp mode? I hope it does. The original vi's lisp mode is something I have only seen traditional vi implement thus far, and it's pretty nice.
  - ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
    I actually do not know, as I tend to use slimv [0]. There's a lot of buzz lately around geiser [1] for Emacs, and few Scheme implementations provide a workable SLIME interface, but for the most part I get by. I don't miss too much, and don't see why everyone assumes Emacs is the only way to write lispy code (without a full blown IDE like Dr. Racket). Vim + paredit inside of tmux, with a proper REPL in another pane / window is a great workflow. Of course this requires some more plugins to Vim, but for the most part sending commands through tmux is pretty lightweight. [0] https://bitbucket.org/kovisoft/slimv https://bitbucket.org/kovisoft/slimv [1] http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/ http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Guile is my second favorite scheme (after chicken). It's semi-R6RS, but still feels nice, and still feels scheme-y. It's nicely practical, and it's one of the rare Scheme implementations to support pthreads. Also, it has a lot of good libraries (behind Racket and Chicken, but better than many schemes), and an FFI that's actually pretty nice, but encourages writing a wrapper around the library that's more than paper-thin. It also embeds well, with it and Chibi being pretty much the only game in town on Scheme embedding. I love it, just not as much as I love Chicken.

na85 10y ago
What is the scheme equivent of ANSI C or Common Lisp? By that I mean what is the default/main/vanilla scheme?
- hood_syntax 10y ago
  Probably MIT Scheme, but afaik it's not suitable for production applications since it's a tool for teaching. It is the 'vanilla' Scheme though
  - bandrami 10y ago
    IIRC MIT is the only one that will actually run the SICP code out of the box.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      No, most of SICP should run in any scheme. Although a bit of it may be MIT specific.
    - sigjuice 10y ago
      I was able to work through the first three chapters using racket in Emacs, including the part dealing with pictures http://i.imgur.com/fwCUUZI.png http://i.imgur.com/fwCUUZI.png
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Frenchgeek 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iof5pRAIZmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iof5pRAIZmw ( Sorry )

AceJohnny2 10y ago
Well, you're not wrong: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guiles-theme-goes-with-everything http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guiles-theme-goes-with-everyth...

AceJohnny2 10y ago

I need to check out Guile's suitability for embedability in applications. Traditional suggestions have been TCL, Python, and Lua. For Guile, the conversation always focuses on FSF and Emacs, but that's boring. Has anyone [other than FSF/Emacs] used it as an application extension language? If so, what's your experience? What's the overhead? memory usage? Ideally, I'd like to use it on embedded systems/firmware (as opposed to embedded in an PC application), but I'm assuming it's either too memory-intensive or requires too much platform support, and certainly the license won't fit :(

shakna 10y ago
Guile's lib you have to link against is 2.5mb, and much of the object code for any Scheme you end up compiling is 0.5-3mb. That was enough to get Guile disqualified from our project. I never managed to get it running on anything with less than 16mb of RAM, but that might have been my own C wrapper, YMMV.