7 ms·

Guile 2.0 is out

81 points by vu3rdd 16y ago

srean 16y ago
Debian testing(wheezy) lists version 1.8.7. Any chance this will get into wheezy ? Love the fact that Guile has picked up a lot of steam.
- mapleoin 16y ago
  This isn't exactly the right place to ask this sort of questions. Why not email your distro's guile maintainer? Or open a bug report. Or just search for an already existing discussion on this topic on Debian's usual maintainer communication channels.
  - bryanlarsen 16y ago
    If the author thinks others might be interested in the answer, this is exactly the right place for this type of question. Sure, it's not going to get upvoted to the top of the page, but it's the type of constructive question and answer that belongs near the bottom of a comment thread. Both Debian & Guile are interesting to hackers, and there would be a large overlap between the type of hackers interested in Debian and the type of hackers interested in Guile.
    - mapleoin 16y ago
      You could make the same argument for Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and others and I don't think it would be a good idea to have threads for all of those in this discussion.
- callahad 16y ago
  There's no real reason to expect that it wouldn't make it in. Squeeze was just promoted to Stable, so Wheezy should remain unfrozen for months to come. That's ample time to bring in guile-2.0 during the normal migration of packages from Unstable to Testing.
mhd 16y ago
Guile was RMS' counter-argument to tcl as an extension language back in the days, right? And wasn't it supposed to be a possible elisp replacement, too? It would be very nice if someone could summarize the current state of the language, i.e. why one would use it instead of Racket or Gambit.
- davidw 16y ago
  Yeah, Tcl had/has an "evil" BSD license.
  - froydnj 16y ago
    Surprisingly enough, this was not among the reasons cited in RMS's original "Why you should not use Tcl" post: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - pmarin 16y ago
      The only reasons were [1]: -Tcl is not Lisp. -At that time Tcl was being developed by an Evil company: Sun Microsystems. At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp. It looks a tiny bit like Lisp, but semantically it isn't, and it's not as clean. Then someone showed me an ad where Sun was trying to hire somebody to work on TCL to make it the “de-facto standard extension language” of the world. And I thought, “We've got to stop that from happening.” So we started to make Scheme the standard extensibility language for GNU. Not Common Lisp, because it was too large. The idea was that we would have a Scheme interpreter designed to be linked into applications in the same way TCL was linked into applications. We would then recommend that as the preferred extensibility package for all GNU programs. [1]http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
      - sigzero 16y ago
mapleoin 16y ago
Is anyone using guile for any fun project? Or are there any fun projects to work on with guile? I would love to learn Scheme as my next hobby language and guile seems like the way to go with all the things that have started to happen with it lately.
- cpach 16y ago
  wingo:s blog software Tekuti seems really neat: http://wingolog.org/software/tekuti/ http://wingolog.org/software/tekuti/ http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/12/13/meta-data http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/12/13/meta-data
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Personally I would prefer Racket over Guile, but if it starts to keep its promise about becoming the scripting language for linux then I would get more interested. Any link for all the things that have started to happen with it lately for those of us who are out of the loop?
  - mapleoin 16y ago
    I guess I've just seen quite a few releases lately that were also broadcast via HN. There was also a previous discussion about guile's webby features: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2017419 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2017419
chalst 16y ago
The meta command support in the new REPL looks like it is copied from Scheme48. How does Guile compare to scsh these days?
- wingo 16y ago
  It is indeed copied from some other Scheme, though I can't recall which. Rather embarrassingly, I've never fired up Scheme48, or used the original scsh. Lots of the POSIX bits in Guile were inspired by scsh though, originally anyway. Most of those pieces are 10+ years old. There are ports around for scsh; googling "guile scsh" will lead you to a few. But there is no proper package with a proper manual.
  - chalst 16y ago
    Command language: Look at chapter 3 of the s48 guide at http://s48.org/1.8/manual/manual-Z-H-4.html#node_chap_3 http://s48.org/1.8/manual/manual-Z-H-4.html#node_chap_3 Scsh: There was a whole lot of noise and some code about supporting Scsh on Guile early last decade, as there was for PLT Scheme, but both seem to have run out of steam. I think that replicating Scsh is harder than it looked at first. I'm really pleased to see the work on the command language and bytecode interpreter. Scsh is something I've built a few times, but never got into. First the sounds of progress on the Emacs/guile front and now this look positive: it's a good time to take another look at Guile.
    - chalst 16y ago
      s/Scsh is something/Guile is something/
LiteOn 16y ago
Sonic BOOM!
mwexler 16y ago
For those who have lost count of the zillions of languages out there, this is a Scheme interpreter/vm that was supposed to become the "official" extension language for GNU projects. It had some publicity in the 90s, but slowed down until recently. Sorry to be simplistic, but so many links here assume everyone is an expert in functional programming; a little context helps everyone understand the importance of a post.
- pmarin 16y ago
  This information is in the third paragraph.
sigzero 16y ago
Is there a Windows version to play around with?
oddthink 16y ago
I still don't understand Guile. It makes sense as a stand-alone language implementation, but not as an embeddable one. Why isn't it re-entrant? What about multiple interpreters? Why a C-level GC like Boehm, rather than just track your own garbage? Why scheme for an embeddable language, don't continuations make C interop hard? Even back when they announced Guile, it seemed odd that they based it on SCM rather than on SIOD or TinyScheme. Lua seems to be far superior for embedding. Guile seems big and invasive by comparison. It seems to be heading squarely for that awkward middle size between big/full-featured and small/light that hurt Tcl, as argued in http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-... .
- wingo 16y ago
  You raise some interesting questions, and some misconceptions. It's an ugly format, but I'm going to respond point-by-point: > Why isn't it re-entrant? I'm not certain what you mean here; certainly you can call from C to Scheme to C to Scheme, and do so concurrently from multiple pthreads. > What about multiple interpreters? Like arenas? Guile doesn't do this, no. I've never understood the desire for this, either; if you want to isolate users, put them in different modules. > Why a C-level GC like Boehm, rather than just track your own garbage? Precisely for embeddability. Tracking your own garbage is hard in C. It's doable of course, but very error-prone. Guile's C API is pretty easy to use (IMO of course). > Why scheme for an embeddable language, don't continuations make C interop hard? We have continuation barriers, but it's true that our historical continuation implementation has been a stack-copying one. In 2.2 we are likely to move to a model where we just capture the Scheme stack. That said, delimited continuations are really the bee's knees. See "Prompts" in the manual for more. > Even back when they announced Guile, it seemed odd that they based it on SCM rather than on SIOD or TinyScheme. I think the thing was that folks wanted an implementation that could grow into something more substantial. Which leads to your next point: > Lua seems to be far superior for embedding. Guile seems big and invasive by comparison. The problem is that once you have a nice small language, you start to want to program more and more in it, and you end up with a nice medium-sized language. You can see that even now with Alex Shinn's Chibi. It seems to be a hump you have to grow over and then become a nice large language ;-) Lua is wonderful, and they are among the few groups I have heard of that manage to keep things small and lean. By all means, use it! But I think that in the end, most things tend towards something the size of Python, and for mostly good reasons.
igneous4 16y ago
In what ways is Guile different from other Schemes, such as Gambit and Chicken? Is Guile a good Scheme to start off with when first learning Scheme?
- krakensden 16y ago
  It's easy to embed, it also has (had?) a Javascript-syntax mode. Racket is what most people recommend for learning.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
rmjb 16y ago
People looking for a tiny, embeddable scheme should also check out Alex Shinn's chibi-scheme.
vu3rdd 16y ago
Guile also comes with a high quality manual ~ 800 pages long, thanks to the tireless work by Neil Jerram and others.

81 points by vu3rdd 16y ago

srean 16y ago

Debian testing(wheezy) lists version 1.8.7. Any chance this will get into wheezy ? Love the fact that Guile has picked up a lot of steam.

mapleoin 16y ago
This isn't exactly the right place to ask this sort of questions. Why not email your distro's guile maintainer? Or open a bug report. Or just search for an already existing discussion on this topic on Debian's usual maintainer communication channels.
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  If the author thinks others might be interested in the answer, this is exactly the right place for this type of question. Sure, it's not going to get upvoted to the top of the page, but it's the type of constructive question and answer that belongs near the bottom of a comment thread. Both Debian & Guile are interesting to hackers, and there would be a large overlap between the type of hackers interested in Debian and the type of hackers interested in Guile.
  - mapleoin 16y ago
    You could make the same argument for Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and others and I don't think it would be a good idea to have threads for all of those in this discussion.
callahad 16y ago
There's no real reason to expect that it wouldn't make it in. Squeeze was just promoted to Stable, so Wheezy should remain unfrozen for months to come. That's ample time to bring in guile-2.0 during the normal migration of packages from Unstable to Testing.

mhd 16y ago

Guile was RMS' counter-argument to tcl as an extension language back in the days, right? And wasn't it supposed to be a possible elisp replacement, too? It would be very nice if someone could summarize the current state of the language, i.e. why one would use it instead of Racket or Gambit.

davidw 16y ago
Yeah, Tcl had/has an "evil" BSD license.
- froydnj 16y ago
  Surprisingly enough, this was not among the reasons cited in RMS's original "Why you should not use Tcl" post: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmarin 16y ago
    The only reasons were [1]: -Tcl is not Lisp. -At that time Tcl was being developed by an Evil company: Sun Microsystems. At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp. It looks a tiny bit like Lisp, but semantically it isn't, and it's not as clean. Then someone showed me an ad where Sun was trying to hire somebody to work on TCL to make it the “de-facto standard extension language” of the world. And I thought, “We've got to stop that from happening.” So we started to make Scheme the standard extensibility language for GNU. Not Common Lisp, because it was too large. The idea was that we would have a Scheme interpreter designed to be linked into applications in the same way TCL was linked into applications. We would then recommend that as the preferred extensibility package for all GNU programs. [1]http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
    - sigzero 16y ago

mapleoin 16y ago

Is anyone using guile for any fun project? Or are there any fun projects to work on with guile? I would love to learn Scheme as my next hobby language and guile seems like the way to go with all the things that have started to happen with it lately.

cpach 16y ago
wingo:s blog software Tekuti seems really neat: http://wingolog.org/software/tekuti/ http://wingolog.org/software/tekuti/ http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/12/13/meta-data http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/12/13/meta-data
loewenskind 16y ago
Personally I would prefer Racket over Guile, but if it starts to keep its promise about becoming the scripting language for linux then I would get more interested. Any link for all the things that have started to happen with it lately for those of us who are out of the loop?
- mapleoin 16y ago
  I guess I've just seen quite a few releases lately that were also broadcast via HN. There was also a previous discussion about guile's webby features: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2017419 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2017419

chalst 16y ago

The meta command support in the new REPL looks like it is copied from Scheme48. How does Guile compare to scsh these days?

wingo 16y ago
It is indeed copied from some other Scheme, though I can't recall which. Rather embarrassingly, I've never fired up Scheme48, or used the original scsh. Lots of the POSIX bits in Guile were inspired by scsh though, originally anyway. Most of those pieces are 10+ years old. There are ports around for scsh; googling "guile scsh" will lead you to a few. But there is no proper package with a proper manual.
- chalst 16y ago
  Command language: Look at chapter 3 of the s48 guide at http://s48.org/1.8/manual/manual-Z-H-4.html#node_chap_3 http://s48.org/1.8/manual/manual-Z-H-4.html#node_chap_3 Scsh: There was a whole lot of noise and some code about supporting Scsh on Guile early last decade, as there was for PLT Scheme, but both seem to have run out of steam. I think that replicating Scsh is harder than it looked at first. I'm really pleased to see the work on the command language and bytecode interpreter. Scsh is something I've built a few times, but never got into. First the sounds of progress on the Emacs/guile front and now this look positive: it's a good time to take another look at Guile.
  - chalst 16y ago
    s/Scsh is something/Guile is something/

LiteOn 16y ago

Sonic BOOM!

mwexler 16y ago

For those who have lost count of the zillions of languages out there, this is a Scheme interpreter/vm that was supposed to become the "official" extension language for GNU projects. It had some publicity in the 90s, but slowed down until recently. Sorry to be simplistic, but so many links here assume everyone is an expert in functional programming; a little context helps everyone understand the importance of a post.

pmarin 16y ago
This information is in the third paragraph.

sigzero 16y ago

Is there a Windows version to play around with?

oddthink 16y ago

I still don't understand Guile. It makes sense as a stand-alone language implementation, but not as an embeddable one. Why isn't it re-entrant? What about multiple interpreters? Why a C-level GC like Boehm, rather than just track your own garbage? Why scheme for an embeddable language, don't continuations make C interop hard? Even back when they announced Guile, it seemed odd that they based it on SCM rather than on SIOD or TinyScheme. Lua seems to be far superior for embedding. Guile seems big and invasive by comparison. It seems to be heading squarely for that awkward middle size between big/full-featured and small/light that hurt Tcl, as argued in http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-... .

wingo 16y ago
You raise some interesting questions, and some misconceptions. It's an ugly format, but I'm going to respond point-by-point: > Why isn't it re-entrant? I'm not certain what you mean here; certainly you can call from C to Scheme to C to Scheme, and do so concurrently from multiple pthreads. > What about multiple interpreters? Like arenas? Guile doesn't do this, no. I've never understood the desire for this, either; if you want to isolate users, put them in different modules. > Why a C-level GC like Boehm, rather than just track your own garbage? Precisely for embeddability. Tracking your own garbage is hard in C. It's doable of course, but very error-prone. Guile's C API is pretty easy to use (IMO of course). > Why scheme for an embeddable language, don't continuations make C interop hard? We have continuation barriers, but it's true that our historical continuation implementation has been a stack-copying one. In 2.2 we are likely to move to a model where we just capture the Scheme stack. That said, delimited continuations are really the bee's knees. See "Prompts" in the manual for more. > Even back when they announced Guile, it seemed odd that they based it on SCM rather than on SIOD or TinyScheme. I think the thing was that folks wanted an implementation that could grow into something more substantial. Which leads to your next point: > Lua seems to be far superior for embedding. Guile seems big and invasive by comparison. The problem is that once you have a nice small language, you start to want to program more and more in it, and you end up with a nice medium-sized language. You can see that even now with Alex Shinn's Chibi. It seems to be a hump you have to grow over and then become a nice large language ;-) Lua is wonderful, and they are among the few groups I have heard of that manage to keep things small and lean. By all means, use it! But I think that in the end, most things tend towards something the size of Python, and for mostly good reasons.

igneous4 16y ago

In what ways is Guile different from other Schemes, such as Gambit and Chicken? Is Guile a good Scheme to start off with when first learning Scheme?

krakensden 16y ago
It's easy to embed, it also has (had?) a Javascript-syntax mode. Racket is what most people recommend for learning.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

rmjb 16y ago

People looking for a tiny, embeddable scheme should also check out Alex Shinn's chibi-scheme.

vu3rdd 16y ago

Guile also comes with a high quality manual ~ 800 pages long, thanks to the tireless work by Neil Jerram and others.