Hello everyone,
WARNING: I cannot commit to any of the work below but I would try to do a build system port if that makes sense.
I have been trying guile for a while lately (again). So far, so great! Congratulations for this amazing piece of software. I am interested in making real use of it in two main areas: as a general scripting engine and for embedding in games.
Racket is also very mature and very good as a platform, but I would like to put my effort in helping in guile maybe, especially because I use it as an alternative to python and because guile supports native threads.
Here my questions:
1. As a general scripting engine, even if I love scheme, I know people do not use it much, so this becomes kind of a social problem in team usage: what is the status and roadmap to port: _javascript_, lua and python? I would like to be able to use as an alternative inside guile. What is the effort to complete _javascript_ (I think it was started) in man-hours?
2. Windows works under POSIX. What would be the effort of doing a port to native windows threads? Effort in man-hours?
3. Is there any interest in switching to meson build system? I think that it works very well already and supports windows much better than autotools. I have used it myself and it is improving day by day. I think it would be reasonable to do 2. and 3. together if there is will. I could help converting the project to meson as experimental myself. Effort in man-hours?
4. Interoperability: I was planning at some point, but I do not know if I will find the time, to find a painless (as painless as Chaiscript for example) way to bind scheme to C++ directly (not C), because it is the main language I make use of. So maybe I could make use of the native bindings and put a thin layer on top of it. Right now it makes a lot of sense for me as a C API but I find it too verbose to use from C++: in C++ maybe I could do better, something more similar to Chaiscript or
https://github.com/pybind/pybind11.
All this said, I am kind of a rookie still in scheme, but I am enjoying it like no other dynamic language before :)
I would like to see guile succeed and I think that supporting more languages is critical given that scheme's popularity is not as big as python's or _javascript_'s, but it is still possible to do so much more in guile that I would not like to lose the chance to use it.
Thanks for your time.