texmacs-dev
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Texmacs-dev] DRDs, converters, LaTeX


From: Joris van der Hoeven
Subject: Re: [Texmacs-dev] DRDs, converters, LaTeX
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 11:29:20 +0200 (CEST)

On Wed, 7 May 2003, Leo wrote:
> On Wednesday May 07 2003 06:46, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> > Hi,
> > [...snip...]
> >
> > Unfortunately, Guile is a *very bad* Scheme implementation,
> > so the use of DRDs is slow.
>
> I second your opinion that guile is one of the worst
> scheme implementations available.
> That said, do you plan "to change the horse" before it is too late.
> TeXmacs is becoming dependent on more and more guile specific constructs
> like guile module system which makes porting effort ever harder??

First of all, in the next couple of months I will mainly be
reorganizing C++ code, so the Guile interface won't change a lot,
except for additions by David. I asked David not to depend on
new Scheme features and even less on Guile specific features.

Secondly, even if we use another Scheme implementation,
we want to remain compatible with Guile too,
because it *is* the implementation which is most available.
Notice also that we want to remain compatible with
all older versions of Guile.

Third, I have understood that the MzScheme guys try to
provide a Guile compatability library (for Guile 1.3.4,
but that is OK for us, since we keep the compatability).
This does not work yet, but TeXmacs might be a good
Cobaye for testing such a library.

Finally, after one year of silence, the development of
Guile seems to have resumed. It may be worth it to wait
six months and see whether they manage to speed things up.

As a conclusion, I prefer to wait a while (three or six months)
and reconsider the question. Either Guile improved a lot
(and the question disappears), or MzScheme provides a good
Guile compatability library (so we can switch without much pain),
or we will need to really spend a few weeks on this issue.
In the last case, a good solution might be to contact
the MzScheme developers and ask *them* whether they are
willing to do the porting, so that they can get an opinion
on how easy future portings might be.





reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]