4 ms·

Guile is a great little Scheme. I found it to be a very welcoming environment to program on Linux and I'm having a ton of fun relearning Lisp with it. Having

by Steltek 13y ago

Guile is a great little Scheme. I found it to be a very welcoming environment to program on Linux and I'm having a ton of fun relearning Lisp with it. Having tried using SBCL as a "Unix-ing with Lisp", Guile was so much easier. It Just Worked the way I expected when touching the OS, compared to CL's crazy filepaths and time epoch. I've also greatly enjoyed reading the compiler/VM backstory on http://wingolog.org/ http://wingolog.org/ . It occurs to me that if you have an efficient Scheme VM, you could use it as a target for a lot of other languages and get something of an 100% OSS .Net or Java polyglot ecosystem going. Parrot was the previous hope but it seems to have fallen into being a mostly academic exercise. And then there's "GuileMacs", which seems to get closer to a reality with every push. Not being a native Lisper, I think Emacs could use a boost from having a faster VM and lexical scope. Really there's just a lot to love about Guile. I'm excited about all the activity and attention it's getting.

wging 13y ago
FYI, emacs lisp already does have lexical scope. It is optional, as I understand it. Not sure how you choose to use it.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  (setq lexical-binding t)
  - quotemstr 13y ago
    Not quite. lexical-binding is buffer-local, so evaling that code probably won't do what you want. Instead, put this at the top of any elisp file you want to be interpreted with lexical scoping: ;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*- Unfortunately, lexical-binding _must_ be optional and off by default. Old code often breaks badly when run under the new rules, mostly because people did silly things like sending out-parameters by symbol name and using add-to-list on local variables.
cookrn 13y ago
I'm hopeful for Rubinius w/r/t a long-term viable polyglot VM. It has _lots_ of languages built for it but Ruby is still its most popular and mature as far as I know. http://rubini.us/ http://rubini.us/
- e12e 13y ago
  I wasn't aware Rubinius was a polygot vm -- but are there any usable languages ported other than Ruby? Both the Smalltalk and Python port appear to be unfinished and abandoned?
  - cookrn 13y ago
    Fancy[0] is one of the most mature languages on the VM other than Ruby I believe. [0] https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy

by Steltek 13y ago

wging 13y ago

FYI, emacs lisp already does have lexical scope. It is optional, as I understand it. Not sure how you choose to use it.

agumonkey 13y ago
(setq lexical-binding t)
- quotemstr 13y ago
  Not quite. lexical-binding is buffer-local, so evaling that code probably won't do what you want. Instead, put this at the top of any elisp file you want to be interpreted with lexical scoping: ;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*- Unfortunately, lexical-binding _must_ be optional and off by default. Old code often breaks badly when run under the new rules, mostly because people did silly things like sending out-parameters by symbol name and using add-to-list on local variables.

cookrn 13y ago

I'm hopeful for Rubinius w/r/t a long-term viable polyglot VM. It has _lots_ of languages built for it but Ruby is still its most popular and mature as far as I know. http://rubini.us/ http://rubini.us/

e12e 13y ago
I wasn't aware Rubinius was a polygot vm -- but are there any usable languages ported other than Ruby? Both the Smalltalk and Python port appear to be unfinished and abandoned?
- cookrn 13y ago
  Fancy[0] is one of the most mature languages on the VM other than Ruby I believe. [0] https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy