Re: Lightning Bindings

[Noah Lavine]

They claim that MELT is tightly integrated with GCC, but after reading 
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/MiddleEndLispTranslator, I don't believe it. The "MELT 
compiler implementation" description suggests that it's a pretty simple-minded 
sexp-to-C translator. I also notice that none of the examples has any control 
structures more complicated than `if` and `foreach`. I'd say it's basically a 
nice syntax for messing with GCC data structures.

When the page says "very tightly integrated into GCC", it seems to mean "has 
boxed versions of a few internal GCC data structures" (there's a list on the 
page I link. It's not very long). That shouldn't be hard at all to connect 
Guile to.

The only part that could be tricky is interfacing with GCC's garbage 
collection. I don't know how Guile's FFI interacts with other memory management 
systems, so this could be a problem, but I think it could be done. It's going 
to have to be solved anyway if Guile is going to interface with other memory 
management systems.

Besides, this is one of Guile's objectives, isn't it? GNU programs shouldn't 
need to implement their own extension languages, because Guile can handle it.

Noah