Re: [Texmacs-dev] A small article on the current work on the Scheme backend

[TeXmacs]

Dear Max,

Thanks for your extensive research and work on these issues.
I would like to mention a few more things:

- Denis and I currently opted for Guile 1.6 instead of Guile 1.8 for
  inclusion in the TeXmacs sources (at least temporarily).
  The reason is that Guile 1.6 has far less dependencies and
  seems to have similar performance as Guile 1.8.

- There is also a cultural factor involved in the decision-making.
  On the one hand, Guile is part of the GNU project, which makes
  it a natural choice.  On the other hand, they have betrayed
  their original promise of being a light-weight extension language.
  This has had a very negative impact on the stability and the diffusion
  of TeXmacs, since GNU/Linux distributions have gradually removed
  support for Guile 1.*.  It is very upsetting to me that they kept
  the name "Guile": to an outsider, it may look that we are unwilling
  to spent a "small effort" on keeping up with "Guile".  But the move
  from Guile 1.* to Guile 2.* would actually require a _lot_ of work,
  for an uncertain pay-off (except "keeping up").  For this reason,
  I have little faith in Guile: if Guile 3.* were absolutely fantastic,
  then this might motivate me; but we can already smell new problems
  (cross OS support, an every growing number of dependencies),
  whereas an even more impressive performance gain could be achieved
  with other scheme compilers such as Chez Scheme.

Best wishes, --Joris


On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 06:53:41PM +0100, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
> Dear all,
>  I've resumed in a small article my current understanding of the strategic 
> issues related to choosing a Scheme implementation for the future of TeXmacs 
> (i.e. after 2.1)
> 
> https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/scheming.html
> 
> Comments are welcome.
> 
> Max
> 
> 
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