guile-emacs for gsoc

[Brian Templeton]

Hello Guile hackers,

I'm preparing Summer of Code applications and am considering working on
Emacs-Guile integration. Here's my understanding of the current
situation, from skimming list archives, source code, etc.:

* Guile now has a partial implementation of Emacs Lisp, and it mostly
  works although a few features are missing

* Ken Raeburn has done proof-of-concept work to make Emacs use Guile's
  object representation and GC for Emacs Lisp, which is now outdated but
  shows that it's feasible (and perhaps it could be forward-ported?)

* Emacs Lisp interaction is pervasive throughout much of the Emacs C
  code, but I don't know how well-abstracted it is

* Once Guile's Emacs Lisp support is sufficiently good, Guile can be
  swapped in for the Emacs Lisp evaluator

I'm not yet familiar with the relevant bits of Guile and Emacs internals
(though I've worked on other Lisp implementations), and I only started
following Guile development recently. So my question is, where could I
best focus my efforts for two months of full-time work (plus a month of
relatively free time before GSoC officially begins)? One obvious project
would be to finish up the Emacs Lisp implementation; I just started
looking at it last night, so I don't know how complete it really is.
Another might be to go ahead with replacing the Emacs Lisp evaluator
even if Guile's Emacs Lisp implementation is not quite complete, enough
to get it booting (and then improving the Emacs Lisp language
implementation would have immediate benefits). And then there are side
projects like writing a bytecode interpreter.

If you have feedback for my application, you'll have to respond before
19:00 UTC on Friday. (My apologies for the late message! I was working
on a rather different proposal, and only found out recently that there
is significant active interest in Guile-Emacs.) Of course I'm still
interested in discussing it after then, and any suggestions are helpful.

thanks,
bpt
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