Re: [Texmacs-dev] Guile 2.0 for TeXmacs?

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi Karl,

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 02:46:48PM -0700, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone is presently working on patching TeXmacs so that it
> will build and run with Guile 2.0. In the Guile-2.0 NEWS file, I see that
> "The GH interface (deprecated in version 1.6, 2001) was removed." TeXmacs
> fails to build because it's looking for <guile/gh.h> which is no longer
> present.

Yes, I am aware of the problem, but I have not really been working on it yet.
Guile induces a *lot* of problems at the moment and it is not even clear that
we really want to go all the way to Guile 2.*. On the one hand, it is true that
Guile 2.0 includes a much faster byte code interpreter. On the other hand 
though,
Guile is growing more and more maximalistic: the number of dependencies is
going out of hand, making portability a major concern. Also, Guile 2.0
now relies on Boehm GC for garbage collection; having used this garbage
collector in another project, I am very suspicious and fear that this move
may introduce subtle bugs and make code harder to debug. I have discussed
these issues on the GNU developers list and the Guile developers are willing
to make things a little bit better. Yet, it is not clear at all that this
will be enough. Massimiliano has started to look for possible replacements
of Guile. Another solution would be to stick to an old version, include
the sources with TeXmacs and take care of maintainance issues ourselves.

Best wishes, --Joris