GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

Ok, so I've heard about Guile, but never really paid it any attention. The home page is interesting, but doesn't reference any newbie guides for people like me.

They seem to have a JavaScript compiler front end, does this mean that by implementing Guile in your program you could use js to enhance your app?

Next question: if you had a web based app, could you use Guile to extend the site?

noahl• 14 years ago

Hi,

I contribute to Guile (in a very small way); I'm happy to answer whatever questions I can about it.

You're right, I don't know of any newbie guides. If you already know Scheme, you'll find Guile easy, but if you don't, you'll need to learn that. You might be able to get started with the Guile manual, but that seems a little difficult, because it's really for reference. SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html) is the classic way to learn Scheme. If you're not interested in that, you can search for another introduction to Scheme. There are plenty of them around. The real issue for someone who knows how to program already is that Scheme is often used as a teaching language, so a lot of the introductions will be very basic.

There is a JavaScript frontend, but I don't think it's finished yet. Yes, if you embedded Guile in your program you could extend your program with JS, but you might need to do some work on Guile's JavaScript implementation first. Although even in its present state, it should be much, much easier to complete Guile's implementation than to build your own; plus you'd get the benefit of Guile's backend compiler work.

As for webapps, no, I don't think you could do what you're talking about. You can certainly use Guile to write the backend to a web app, and in fact it has a (web ...) series of modules for that, but you could do that with any other language too. You can't use Guile in the frontend of a web app, because that really depends on what browsers support. (Although it's possible you could use Guile to compile Scheme to JavaScript, if you want to do that.)

ths• 14 years ago

If you want a lisp that compiles to JS, ClojureScript is also a good option. It's ready for use, and there's a lot of smart people working on making it better. The Clojure/ClojureScript community is also very good - intelligent and friendly.

markokocic2• 14 years ago

I remember reading a while ago about an initiative to switch Emacs elisp implementation to use Guile backend. I haven't been watching that closely.

Does anyone have more information about the status of that project/initiative?

jfb3• 14 years ago

It's dead. It never really got legs; similar projects are proposed pretty much monthly on emacs-devel only to die quietly.

mhd• 14 years ago

Yeah, it's fighting with "Let's reimplement Emacs in Common Lisp" for most often tried, yet ultimately unsuccessful project. I think there was a GSoC project recently, but haven't heard anything about its results.

flavoie• 14 years ago

Is Guile only for GNU system? Can it be embedded in OSX, iOS or Android application?

dchest• 14 years ago

The license is LGPLv3.

Arelius• 14 years ago

Last I checked, this prevents distribution in an App store (correct me if I'm wrong) but there is nothing preventing you from using it on say OS X

GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

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