Re: [Texmacs-dev] GNU Guile 3.0.0 released and some suggestions for future GNU TeXmacs

[TeXmacs]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 06:18:53PM +0100, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
> I???ve just tried and TeXmacs runs fine with Guile 1.6.8 on my MacBook Air 
> (Catilina).
> 
> I wonder what, from our point of view, is the substantial difference between 
> 1.6 and 1.8. The advantage of 1.6 is that essentially requires no other 
> library, while 1.8 has a host of dependencies (which however are standard, so 
> not much of an issue on Linux).

If my memory is right, there have not been many improvements between the two 
versions
from our point of view.  There are a few more features (e.g. charsets; I still 
have
to adapt some of Miguel's and Grégoire's code because of that).  Maybe speed?
That would require some serious testing.

On the other hand, Guile 1.6 clearly has the advantage of being closer to
the initial concept of a light-weight extension language.  The dependencies
may be standard, but they made it impossible to compile Guile on two Linux
machines at SFU within a reasonable amount of time.  This may be due to
the fact that the dependencies evolve, so we would have to maintain
the interfaces with all these evolutions.

For these reasons, it seems to me that version 1.6.8 is the safest choice.

Best wishes, --Joris