Re: Some wild considerations and a question

[Thomas Morley]

Hi Jacques,

I split my replies to address different aspects separately.

This one about scheme/guile

Am Mo., 19. Okt. 2020 um 08:40 Uhr schrieb Jacques Menu <imj-muzhic@bluewin.ch>:

> Some aspects of the current state of the Lily implementation are a bit 
> saddening:
>         - Scheme is not easy to read nor write for most users, who can 
> fortunately get help from the very useful and active users group;
>         - the extensive use of Scheme code in the implementation is very 
> flexible and powerful, but implies performance limitations;

> There have been very interesting discussions about all this at the Salzburg 
> conference last January, which lead me to dream of things being done another 
> way in an ideal world:
>         - switch to another, easier to read and write extension language. 
> Someone suggested Lua, for example, which would be a good candidate it seems;
>         - rely more on C++ in the implantation for speed, keeping the 
> extension language mainly for users in their files;

Doing more in C++ will probably speed up, though then this
C++-functionality is not longer accessible for the user.
Unless you provide entrance-hooks in said C++-code which probably will
lower speed again.

Currently the melange of scheme-guile/C++ is very close. Switching to
another extension language will mean to rewrite mostly anything,
loosing a plethora of user-code like in oll and LSR and on this list.

Furthermore, speaking only for myself, I'm not a programmer, I have
not even owned a computer for the first three decades of my life.
After discovering LilyPond I learned guile to let LilyPond do what I
want it to do. This was work, yes, and I'm still learning. Though, I
will not have the energy and motivation to learn a different language
to extend LilyPond.

Imho, the main problem users have with guile in LilyPond is not guile
itself, but the poorly documented interplay between them.

Cheers,
  Harm