5 ms·

Guilemacs – Emacs with Guile Scheme

120 points by MintelIE 6y ago

MintelIE 6y ago
A couple points to note: This works by dynamically translating elisp to Guile Scheme, which is crucial to ensuring that decades worth of elisp will work without change. However, in Guilemacs, one can use Scheme as well as el as extension languages. Also while it works, it's quite slow at this point in time and, unlike Emacs which rarely if ever crashes, Guilemacs can and will crash.
messe 6y ago
I don't do much lisping or scheming these days, but my experience of Guile has be nothing but exemplary. I'm a VIM user, but I would definitely give emacs another shot if scripting it in scheme was an option (with evil-mode definitely; no way am I giving up modal editing). > It’s best to call it “GuileEmacs” or “Guile/Emacs” or such to make it clear that it’s still GNU Emacs. No love for Guile+Emacs?
- rcthompson 6y ago
  I'm sure one of them will catch on just like GNU/Linux has.
  - openfuture 6y ago
    This is about as correct as telling your wife that your beard will grow on her like it grew on you.
the_duke 6y ago
I was under the impression that this effort has been stalled for 5+ years. Is that incorrect?
- aijony 6y ago
  Last commit: Tue, 12 May 2015 But to be fair Guile Elisp is doing fairly well.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  This is a stalled project, interesting but stalled. There are changes happening elsewhere, for example the obligatory rust mashup: https://github.com/remacs/remacs https://github.com/remacs/remacs gccemacs is probably the most interesting recent development: https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
Surprisingly I found Scheme support in Emacs underwhelming (disclaimer: I'm a Windows user). The best package for Scheme in Emacs seems to be Geiser [1], but it seems pretty basic when compared with Slime [2]. Perhaps Geiser+Guile is a different story if running on Unix, but Slime on Windows just works, so that's a plus for Common Lisp :-). 1: https://www.nongnu.org/geiser/ https://www.nongnu.org/geiser/ 2: https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/
- aijony 6y ago
  Geiser+Guile does work quite fine under Linux for me. Speaking of Scheme and Slime, I have heard of Swank which is for using MIT, Ikarus, Larceny, and Kawa Schemes in Slime.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  My general sense is that the scheme community doesn’t have the “live system” culture the way the Common Lisp and Clojure communities do: schemes generally seem to deemphasize things like live code updates in favor of a more “batch” compiling strategy: I’ve especially noticed this when talking to people in the Racket community, but my general sense is that Racket inherited this from scheme.
  - aijony 6y ago
    I'm quite an amateur schemer and have never used Racket, but Christopher Webber's talk [1] gives me the opposite impression and that Racket diverged from the "live system" culture. In my experience Guile is usually pretty good when it comes to updating things on the fly through the REPL, but there are some gotchas. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/guileracket/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/guileracket/
  - fmakunbound 6y ago
    My impression of Scheme in general as well. Scheme REPL top-levels typically come with some caveats which is an indicator of live system programming being a second class feature.
  - 6y ago
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
"Guile-based Emacs is a branch of GNU Emacs that replaces Emacs’s own EmacsLisp engine with the Elisp compiler of Guile. It does not attempt to remove Elisp. One advantage is that Elisp will potentially execute faster" Another initiative was posted here recently [1]. "GNU Emacs can currently execute Elisp code either interpreted or byte-interpreted after it has been compiled to byte-code ... exploiting libgccjit to achieve code generation using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) infrastructure. ... Though still a work in progress ... Native compiled Elisp shows an increase of performance ranging from 2.3x up to 42x with respect to the equivalent byte-code" 1 : https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g9vdd0/bringing_gnu_emacs_to_native_code_at_the_european/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g9vdd0/bringing_gnu_...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
WhatIsDukkha 6y ago
Watching Tom Tromey's talk on the future of Emacs is a better use of your time I suspect - https://irreal.org/blog/?p=8687 https://irreal.org/blog/?p=8687 He addresses many of the "obvious" ideas many of the casuals that appear in these hn threads have.
- aijony 6y ago
  Funny enough, if you rewrite all of Emacs in Elisp that would superficially seem to make Guile Emacs easier to implement. I wouldn't be surprised if by that time Guile had native compilation and an even better Elisp implementation. Ironically, it would defeat the original intention of Guile extending C programs that was inspired by Emacs, but even the Guile community is starting to lean towards Scheme-only programs with some FFI akin to Tom's ideas.
  - MintelIE 6y ago
    Maybe if you use Guile to rewrite the parts of Emacs that are currently written in C, and go with the dynamic translation idea currently used in Guilemacs you could achieve the same goal. Then you could rewrite Emacs in Guile at your leisure, or not, retaining elisp compatibility for historical and practical reasons alike.
aijony 6y ago
As a user of both Guile and Emacs this project has always intrigued me, but I think people arguing for speed, multitasking, or configuring Emacs in Scheme or Javascript are missing the point. Guile Emacs represents an ideal where GNU projects share a common library that all benefit from shared improvements. For example, if Guile gets native compilation, Guile Emacs, Guix, and any other Guile project gets native compilation. I would never write my Emacs config in Scheme, but I wouldn't hesitate to call a Scheme library from Emacs, or an Elisp library from a Guile project. Guile Emacs would be a huge step unifying all of these separate GNU projects from both a technical and social point of view.
- smabie 6y ago
  I agree, though Emacs does support native compilation at the moment (it's still a work in progress though). It would have been nice if the Guile stuff go merged, but I think that ship has sailed and we should just embrace the native compiler included in Emacs.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
You can also write your own dialect of lisp within elisp, too. I ported Lumen[1] to emacs: https://github.com/shawwn/y/blob/abcf6f4406178880390308ff0b782a5ed516c688/y.el#L251-L263 https://github.com/shawwn/y/blob/abcf6f4406178880390308ff0b7... (define-global cut (x &optional from upto) (with l (dup x) (let (j 0 i (if (or (nil? from) (< from 0)) 0 from) n (\# x) upto (if (or (nil? upto) (> upto n)) n upto)) (while (< i upto) (set (at l j) (at x i)) (inc i) (inc j)) (each (k v) x (unless (number? k) (set (get l k) v)))))) The destructuring LET is so nice. Emacs' reader can also be completely overridden by user code. I used this technique to port pg's Arc to elisp: https://repl.it/repls/UnluckySturdyCharactercode#main.el https://repl.it/repls/UnluckySturdyCharactercode#main.el (If you click "run" and type #\a you'll notice you get "a" rather than a syntax error.) [1] Lumen lisp: https://github.com/sctb/lumen https://github.com/sctb/lumen
chx 6y ago
This really needs a (2016) in the title. The recent edit (not even edits) adds little to nothing and the last commit was in 2015.
xvilka 6y ago
With Guile 3.0 released recently, that is way faster[1] than before, it looks even more interesting. The only problem is that many distributions still didn't update yet[2]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-released.html https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-releas... [2] https://repology.org/project/guile/versions https://repology.org/project/guile/versions
smabie 6y ago
If one is looking to improve Emacs performance, I would recommend checking out gccemacs https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html insteald, as guilemacs has stalled. gccemacs has been merged into the main emacs branch and works by compiling Elisp into dynamically loadable binaries. The performance speedups are very promising, with up to 30x speed improvements over standard byte code. I've been using it as my default emacs and it's been working very well. No crashes and Emacs is finally not slow! Now all Emacs needs is preemptive multi-threading!

120 points by MintelIE 6y ago

A couple points to note: This works by dynamically translating elisp to Guile Scheme, which is crucial to ensuring that decades worth of elisp will work without change. However, in Guilemacs, one can use Scheme as well as el as extension languages. Also while it works, it's quite slow at this point in time and, unlike Emacs which rarely if ever crashes, Guilemacs can and will crash.

messe 6y ago

I don't do much lisping or scheming these days, but my experience of Guile has be nothing but exemplary. I'm a VIM user, but I would definitely give emacs another shot if scripting it in scheme was an option (with evil-mode definitely; no way am I giving up modal editing). > It’s best to call it “GuileEmacs” or “Guile/Emacs” or such to make it clear that it’s still GNU Emacs. No love for Guile+Emacs?

rcthompson 6y ago
I'm sure one of them will catch on just like GNU/Linux has.
- openfuture 6y ago
  This is about as correct as telling your wife that your beard will grow on her like it grew on you.

the_duke 6y ago

I was under the impression that this effort has been stalled for 5+ years. Is that incorrect?

aijony 6y ago
Last commit: Tue, 12 May 2015 But to be fair Guile Elisp is doing fairly well.
stevekemp 6y ago
This is a stalled project, interesting but stalled. There are changes happening elsewhere, for example the obligatory rust mashup: https://github.com/remacs/remacs https://github.com/remacs/remacs gccemacs is probably the most interesting recent development: https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

Surprisingly I found Scheme support in Emacs underwhelming (disclaimer: I'm a Windows user). The best package for Scheme in Emacs seems to be Geiser [1], but it seems pretty basic when compared with Slime [2]. Perhaps Geiser+Guile is a different story if running on Unix, but Slime on Windows just works, so that's a plus for Common Lisp :-). 1: https://www.nongnu.org/geiser/ https://www.nongnu.org/geiser/ 2: https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ https://common-lisp.net/project/slime/

aijony 6y ago
Geiser+Guile does work quite fine under Linux for me. Speaking of Scheme and Slime, I have heard of Swank which is for using MIT, Ikarus, Larceny, and Kawa Schemes in Slime.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
My general sense is that the scheme community doesn’t have the “live system” culture the way the Common Lisp and Clojure communities do: schemes generally seem to deemphasize things like live code updates in favor of a more “batch” compiling strategy: I’ve especially noticed this when talking to people in the Racket community, but my general sense is that Racket inherited this from scheme.
- aijony 6y ago
  I'm quite an amateur schemer and have never used Racket, but Christopher Webber's talk [1] gives me the opposite impression and that Racket diverged from the "live system" culture. In my experience Guile is usually pretty good when it comes to updating things on the fly through the REPL, but there are some gotchas. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/guileracket/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/guileracket/
- fmakunbound 6y ago
  My impression of Scheme in general as well. Scheme REPL top-levels typically come with some caveats which is an indicator of live system programming being a second class feature.
- 6y ago

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

"Guile-based Emacs is a branch of GNU Emacs that replaces Emacs’s own EmacsLisp engine with the Elisp compiler of Guile. It does not attempt to remove Elisp. One advantage is that Elisp will potentially execute faster" Another initiative was posted here recently [1]. "GNU Emacs can currently execute Elisp code either interpreted or byte-interpreted after it has been compiled to byte-code ... exploiting libgccjit to achieve code generation using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) infrastructure. ... Though still a work in progress ... Native compiled Elisp shows an increase of performance ranging from 2.3x up to 42x with respect to the equivalent byte-code" 1 : https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g9vdd0/bringing_gnu_emacs_to_native_code_at_the_european/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/g9vdd0/bringing_gnu_...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

WhatIsDukkha 6y ago

Watching Tom Tromey's talk on the future of Emacs is a better use of your time I suspect - https://irreal.org/blog/?p=8687 https://irreal.org/blog/?p=8687 He addresses many of the "obvious" ideas many of the casuals that appear in these hn threads have.

aijony 6y ago
Funny enough, if you rewrite all of Emacs in Elisp that would superficially seem to make Guile Emacs easier to implement. I wouldn't be surprised if by that time Guile had native compilation and an even better Elisp implementation. Ironically, it would defeat the original intention of Guile extending C programs that was inspired by Emacs, but even the Guile community is starting to lean towards Scheme-only programs with some FFI akin to Tom's ideas.
- MintelIE 6y ago
  Maybe if you use Guile to rewrite the parts of Emacs that are currently written in C, and go with the dynamic translation idea currently used in Guilemacs you could achieve the same goal. Then you could rewrite Emacs in Guile at your leisure, or not, retaining elisp compatibility for historical and practical reasons alike.

aijony 6y ago

As a user of both Guile and Emacs this project has always intrigued me, but I think people arguing for speed, multitasking, or configuring Emacs in Scheme or Javascript are missing the point. Guile Emacs represents an ideal where GNU projects share a common library that all benefit from shared improvements. For example, if Guile gets native compilation, Guile Emacs, Guix, and any other Guile project gets native compilation. I would never write my Emacs config in Scheme, but I wouldn't hesitate to call a Scheme library from Emacs, or an Elisp library from a Guile project. Guile Emacs would be a huge step unifying all of these separate GNU projects from both a technical and social point of view.

smabie 6y ago
I agree, though Emacs does support native compilation at the moment (it's still a work in progress though). It would have been nice if the Guile stuff go merged, but I think that ship has sailed and we should just embrace the native compiler included in Emacs.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

You can also write your own dialect of lisp within elisp, too. I ported Lumen[1] to emacs: https://github.com/shawwn/y/blob/abcf6f4406178880390308ff0b782a5ed516c688/y.el#L251-L263 https://github.com/shawwn/y/blob/abcf6f4406178880390308ff0b7... (define-global cut (x &optional from upto) (with l (dup x) (let (j 0 i (if (or (nil? from) (< from 0)) 0 from) n (\# x) upto (if (or (nil? upto) (> upto n)) n upto)) (while (< i upto) (set (at l j) (at x i)) (inc i) (inc j)) (each (k v) x (unless (number? k) (set (get l k) v)))))) The destructuring LET is so nice. Emacs' reader can also be completely overridden by user code. I used this technique to port pg's Arc to elisp: https://repl.it/repls/UnluckySturdyCharactercode#main.el https://repl.it/repls/UnluckySturdyCharactercode#main.el (If you click "run" and type #\a you'll notice you get "a" rather than a syntax error.) [1] Lumen lisp: https://github.com/sctb/lumen https://github.com/sctb/lumen

chx 6y ago

This really needs a (2016) in the title. The recent edit (not even edits) adds little to nothing and the last commit was in 2015.

xvilka 6y ago

With Guile 3.0 released recently, that is way faster[1] than before, it looks even more interesting. The only problem is that many distributions still didn't update yet[2]. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-released.html https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-releas... [2] https://repology.org/project/guile/versions https://repology.org/project/guile/versions

smabie 6y ago

If one is looking to improve Emacs performance, I would recommend checking out gccemacs https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html insteald, as guilemacs has stalled. gccemacs has been merged into the main emacs branch and works by compiling Elisp into dynamically loadable binaries. The performance speedups are very promising, with up to 30x speed improvements over standard byte code. I've been using it as my default emacs and it's been working very well. No crashes and Emacs is finally not slow! Now all Emacs needs is preemptive multi-threading!