Re: [Help-zile] Guile on Zile, module questions

[Reuben Thomas]

On 28 December 2011 04:57, Mike Gran <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi Mike!
>>
>>>  Over the USA holiday I started looking at the last C version of
>>>  Zile, which has its own toy Lisp interpreter.  (Zile also
>>>  comes in a new Lua version!)  I looks like it would be simple to
>>>  strip out that Zile Lisp and replace it with Guile Scheme.
>>>  But I don't think anyone has tried it.
>>
>> This sounds great!  Another competitor for Gano and Guile-Emacs!  ;-)
>>
>> Where’s the source?  :-)
>
> I have a somewhat complete version at
> https://github.com/spk121/zile
>
> There's a few regressions, and some problems with self-documentation,
> and the build it still fragile, but, it basically works.

A couple more comments:

1. I'm very happy for Zile to be used as an experimental platform.
It's increasingly obsolete as an actual editor (Emacs starts up fast
and runs on most things), but I still maintain it and it has a test
suite. Hence, it's good for making experiments that change the
implementation but keep exactly the same behaviour.

2. The Lua version will shortly become the primary one. In a way this
makes it easier to experiment on the C base, because the C will change
increasingly slowly, but also do not neglect the possibilities of
experimenting with the Lua version. It's much more convenient to
change; Lua is happy to talk to C, so it's transitively happy to talk
to other languages that talk to C; and finally, with respect to Guile
in particular, don't forget that Guile has experimental Lua support,
so there's an obvious way to short-circuit C.

Anything I can do to assist experiments, and ESPECIALLY experiments
aimed at improving GNU, please don't hesitate to write to help-zile or
bug-zile.

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