[Texmacs-dev] message by Philippe Joyez

[TeXmacs]

Dear all,

I forward a message by Philippe, which did not make it to the list for some 
reason

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Right, Guile in Windows is a real headhache. I have been searching for
people who have compiled Guile 2/3 on windows (I mean MinGW). AFAICT
Guile 2.2 can be patched to compile, but I saw no mention at all of
Guile 3 for windows. An alternative could be to use Cygwin (or
midipix.org if that ever becomes viable) but I never tried and I am not
sure how "native" such builds would feel...

Also, if we choose to stick to Guile, we should be aware that mingw
cannot compile it to 64 bits (The main reason is an assumption on the
length of pointers). This is true for Guile1.8, 2.2 and would presumably
be for v 3.x too. And who knows how long the 32bit mingw toolchain will
be maintained in the future...

Moreover, Guile 1.8 has other issues:

- no utf-8 environment variables. If I'm not mistaken this presently
forbids having a TEXMACS_USER_PATH with arbitrary unicode characters in
windows. In principle that could be fixed using the nowide library as I
did for TeXmacs, but that's some work (and presumably a lot of testing).
- bugs (e.g. CVE-2016-8605) or toolchain changes that break Guile
building every now and then, and which less and less people outside of
TeXmacs devs are interested in fixing.

I mention this just to be sure that we have the complete picture in mind
when the scheme interpreter is chosen. 

Best,
Philippe