Re: Roadmap and goals?

[Neil Jerram]

>>>>> "Tanel" == Tanel Tammet <address@hidden> writes:

    Tanel> I am sure the same question is asked now and then.
    Tanel> I looked through the site and part of email archives,
    Tanel> but could not find answers to my questions there.

    Tanel> Basically, I am wondering if anybody could tell
    Tanel> me something about the Guile development goals
    Tanel> and roadmap: what are the short-term goals,
    Tanel> what are the long-term goals, what are the priorities
    Tanel> (I mean concrete issues, not just the abstract
    Tanel> goal of being a good extension language).

I'd say the answers are largely determined by the interests and
priorities of the developers active at any time, as influenced by what
interested users ask for.  I don't know if there is an official
roadmap ...

Some of the things that interest me are: documentation, both manual
and online; debugging facilities; Emacs integration; libguile
factorization; Elisp translation.

    Tanel> I am asking since I was considering whether I
    Tanel> could possibly help with the development work. 

    Tanel> To do that, I'd have to understand where is
    Tanel> the Guile development moving, what are the prioritized
    Tanel> goals, crucial principles, etc. What would be
    Tanel> the projects inside Guile where a person
    Tanel> like me could possibly help.

Well, one longer-term focus is reworking Guile's evaluation model to
support interesting kinds of compilation -- I guess you'd be pretty
helpful in that department.

However, in line with the logic above, what might work better would be
for you to poke around a bit and then form your own view of what
interests you.

    Tanel> I am pretty happy with SCM. I have looked
    Tanel> briefly into bigloo and other systems, and
    Tanel> there are many cool things here and there.

    Tanel> However, I cannot really understand 
    Tanel> (*) what is the driving force behind Guile and
    Tanel> (*) what are the specific benefits of using Guile.

For me I think the answers are (i) because it's GNU (ii) because it's
what I'm now familiar with, which makes me inclined to stick at it
until we get it right.  Plus in all the things that I've tried to do
with it, I've not yet hit any insurmountable technical or
philosophical barrier - it mostly "just works."

Allegedly Guile is good for integration with C projects, but to be
honest I haven't evaluated the competition.

    Tanel> In my brief encounters with other people
    Tanel> using scheme these issues have come up
    Tanel> now and then.

(A point for the wider Scheme community ...)  Guile has more SRFI
support than any of the implementations mentioned on the SRFI web
pages (including Guile itself - someone should get that updated...).

    Tanel> I guess it would benefit not only me 
    Tanel> but the Guile development and acceptance 
    Tanel> on a wider scale if such guides, policies,
    Tanel> roadmaps etc existed and were easy to locate.

Perhaps, but would they be real, or just hype?

        Neil