let's bytecode it!

[Andy Wingo]

Hello,

So long in the past, it seemed that Keisuke's Guile-VM would mature and
replace the existing scm_ceval(). Everyone was down with it: Marius,
Mikael, etc. But it seems that there were some lingering issues, and it
didn't really settle down into Guile proper.

Then a couple yeats ago (!), Ludovic proposed reviving guile-vm, and
started hacking on it in some arch archive somewheres. But again, time
was lacking (I assume) and I can't even find that archive any more.
Ludovic?

I think that a bytecode compiler and VM makes a lot of sense for Guile.
I don't see native compilation ever being a primary target of Guile,
given that our strength is our ubiquity and how we play nice with C, but
a VM would finally bring Guile's speed up to be comparable with e.g.
python.

Also it would be fun to hack!

So how about making guile-vm in core guile a goal for 1.10? I guess the
way to start is for Ludovic to import his repo into git and expose it
somewhere, and perhaps merge it into Guile proper on a branch. Then we
can test it out, see what's going on, hack hack hack&stuff, and maybe
merge it to master at some point.

Thoughts? Neil, Ludo? Other hackers that have always wanted to play
with a compiler (me, me!) ? :-)

Regards,

Andy
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