4 ms·

For those excited about the "Guile's Elisp implementation" in this release. The last major Guile release was 6 years ago, and much of this GuileEmacs work is st

by avar 10y ago

For those excited about the "Guile's Elisp implementation" in this release. The last major Guile release was 6 years ago, and much of this GuileEmacs work is still highly WIP and from my searching on emacs-devel seems to have stalled in 2015 for lack of volunteers. Just because Guile implements Elisp the language doesn't mean there isn't a ton of work to be done on Emacs itself to swap out its native VM for Guile, and it seems nobody's keen on finishing up that work.

pmoriarty 10y ago
What's left to be done?
- avar 10y ago
  I'm not involved in Emacs/Guile/GuileEmacs development. I just searched emacs-devel / EmacsWiki before writing that comment. Having said that it seems to be in a POC state, but is very slow and needs optimization. These two wiki pages provide a decent overview: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs & https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo This "Preview: portable dumper," thread from November 2016 and spin-offs appear to be the most up-to-date emacs-devel discussion on the subject: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/threads.html#00625 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/threa... The older October 2015 "In support of guile-emacs" thread seems to have been written after development mostly tapered out, discusses some work to be done, and is a call for more development (which seems to have gone unanswered): https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/threads.html#01538 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/threa... All the work on the Emacs integration appears to have been done by Robin Templeton in early 2015 with no commit since May 2015: http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=shortlog http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=shortlog
  - 0xCMP 10y ago
    > Thanks to the work of Robin Templeton, Guile's Elisp implementation is now fully Emacs-compatible, implementing all of Elisp's features and quirks in the same way as the editor we know and love. Robin Templeton also seems to be the one which finished off the elisp compatibility on Guile here so it's probably because he saw that as important to get first.
- djcb 10y ago
  One big item is that that Emacs' internal string/buffer representation supports things like loading weirdly (or even erroneously) encoded data, and saving this unchanged; this is sometimes quite useful. Guile's strings (gnulib's) do not support that, and adding the support is quite a bit of works for all the corner-cases that emacs supports. Now, emacs and guile do not necessarily have to use the same underlying string/buffer implementation, but it would definitely be a big plus, and I wouldn't be surprised the emacs maintainers would require it.
microtherion 10y ago
Given that Guile was basically launched by an RMS FUD attack on Tcl more than 20 years ago, 6 years seems like a rounding error. http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/
- davexunit 10y ago
  It's been 6 years since Guile 2.0, when Guile went from being an interpreter only to having a VM and AOT compiler.
  - amirouche 10y ago
    You mean a jit compiler. There is still not AOT compiler for GNU Guile AFAIK. Except janneke work.
    - clacke2 10y ago
      There is an AOT compiler from source to bytecode, and then there is a bytecode interpreter. Wingo is considering the possibility of having a bytecode-to-native JIT or a source-to-native compiler.
    - davexunit 10y ago
      Guile uses an ahead of time (AOT) compiler. Someone wrote an experimental tracing JIT recently [0] but that's not part of Guile itself. [0] https://github.com/8c6794b6/guile-tjit https://github.com/8c6794b6/guile-tjit
      - bandrami 10y ago
        I believe in theory it also uses Lightning[1], but I can no longer get Lightning to build since GCC 6 or so, so I can't verify that. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/ https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/
- belorn 10y ago
  Tcl was accused of being a scripting language that is more suitable for simple scripts, so I went and took a look at the Wikipedia article to see if it too presented a similar view. To quote: "It is commonly used embedded into C applications,[9] for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs, and testing.[10]" Is wikipedia also doing a fud attack on Tcl (as it naturally could be the case), or is RMS post simply a less diplomatic and less friendly way to say that Tcl don't have the same purpose and use case as languages like c and c++? Any turning complete language can of course be used for anything, but looking at how something is used often give a good hint on where its strengths are.

by avar 10y ago

pmoriarty 10y ago

What's left to be done?

avar 10y ago
I'm not involved in Emacs/Guile/GuileEmacs development. I just searched emacs-devel / EmacsWiki before writing that comment. Having said that it seems to be in a POC state, but is very slow and needs optimization. These two wiki pages provide a decent overview: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs & https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo This "Preview: portable dumper," thread from November 2016 and spin-offs appear to be the most up-to-date emacs-devel discussion on the subject: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/threads.html#00625 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/threa... The older October 2015 "In support of guile-emacs" thread seems to have been written after development mostly tapered out, discusses some work to be done, and is a call for more development (which seems to have gone unanswered): https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/threads.html#01538 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/threa... All the work on the Emacs integration appears to have been done by Robin Templeton in early 2015 with no commit since May 2015: http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=shortlog http://git.hcoop.net/?p=bpt/emacs.git;a=shortlog
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  > Thanks to the work of Robin Templeton, Guile's Elisp implementation is now fully Emacs-compatible, implementing all of Elisp's features and quirks in the same way as the editor we know and love. Robin Templeton also seems to be the one which finished off the elisp compatibility on Guile here so it's probably because he saw that as important to get first.
djcb 10y ago
One big item is that that Emacs' internal string/buffer representation supports things like loading weirdly (or even erroneously) encoded data, and saving this unchanged; this is sometimes quite useful. Guile's strings (gnulib's) do not support that, and adding the support is quite a bit of works for all the corner-cases that emacs supports. Now, emacs and guile do not necessarily have to use the same underlying string/buffer implementation, but it would definitely be a big plus, and I wouldn't be surprised the emacs maintainers would require it.

microtherion 10y ago

Given that Guile was basically launched by an RMS FUD attack on Tcl more than 20 years ago, 6 years seems like a rounding error. http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/ http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/

davexunit 10y ago
It's been 6 years since Guile 2.0, when Guile went from being an interpreter only to having a VM and AOT compiler.
- amirouche 10y ago
  You mean a jit compiler. There is still not AOT compiler for GNU Guile AFAIK. Except janneke work.
  - clacke2 10y ago
    There is an AOT compiler from source to bytecode, and then there is a bytecode interpreter. Wingo is considering the possibility of having a bytecode-to-native JIT or a source-to-native compiler.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    Guile uses an ahead of time (AOT) compiler. Someone wrote an experimental tracing JIT recently [0] but that's not part of Guile itself. [0] https://github.com/8c6794b6/guile-tjit https://github.com/8c6794b6/guile-tjit
    - bandrami 10y ago
      I believe in theory it also uses Lightning[1], but I can no longer get Lightning to build since GCC 6 or so, so I can't verify that. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/ https://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/
belorn 10y ago
Tcl was accused of being a scripting language that is more suitable for simple scripts, so I went and took a look at the Wikipedia article to see if it too presented a similar view. To quote: "It is commonly used embedded into C applications,[9] for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs, and testing.[10]" Is wikipedia also doing a fud attack on Tcl (as it naturally could be the case), or is RMS post simply a less diplomatic and less friendly way to say that Tcl don't have the same purpose and use case as languages like c and c++? Any turning complete language can of course be used for anything, but looking at how something is used often give a good hint on where its strengths are.