Re: What is Guile?

[Dale P. Smith]

Jeff Read wrote:

> Converting language X to Scheme, and then interpreting the Scheme is 
> an interesting academic idea but if technology doesn't work for 
> people then it doesn't work. Guile isn't the fastest Scheme 
> interpreter in the world, and adding another layer of parsing and 
> conversion will simply make things slower. If given the choice 
> between a slow, subtly incompatible Perl substitute and Perl, most 
> developers will simply embed Perl. Same goes for Python, or whatever 
> other language you can think of. There's also the taste aversion to 
> Scheme to overcome. GIMP appears to be migrating from Scheme to Perl 
> as its embedded language of choice. Alternatively they will target 
> JVM or MSIL bytecode.

Yes indeed.  I think that's why most of the ficus so far has been on
improving the Guile interpreter and moving to a compiler or other
speedups, like Gnu Lightning.


> That's how free software authors standardized on the creeping horror
> that is Autoconf (which I'm writing a replacement for (in Guile!)).
> :)

Hooray!

-Dale


--
Dale P. Smith
dsmith at actron dot com