Re: Why 3 different evaluators?

[Andy Wingo]

On Wed 16 Nov 2011 06:00, address@hidden writes:

> According to the doc, guile currently maintain 3 evaluators:
>
> - the new VM
> - an evaluator written in scheme
> - the old C evaluator, used for bootstrapping the compiler.
>
> That's a lot of code just to bootstrap the compiler.  Why not bootstrapping 
> the
> compiler from either previous installed guile or (as fall-back) some provided
> .go bytecode instead? Wouldn't that make guile code significantly simpler to
> maintain and faster to compile?

No :)

If I bootstrap Guile-X from Guile-Y, I have to make sure that Guile-X's
code can load in Guile-Y -- not trivial -- and I have to trust the
output of Guile-Y.

If I bootstrap Guile-X from GCC, I have to trust GCC.

I trust GCC more than Guile-Y.

You can use GUILE_FOR_BUILD if you want to speed things up.

Andy
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