Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup]

Taylan Ulrich Bayirli/Kammer <address@hidden> writes:

> Guile on the other hand is GNU software; it's the official GNU
> extension language that's being massively revitalized to be worth of
> its name.  GCC, GDB, and more can be extended in Guile.  It's tied
> with Guix as well; the package manager for the upcoming official GNU
> distribution.  After so many years, things are really getting together
> in technical terms in the GNU project, and Guile is what's pulling it
> all together.

The music typesetter GNU LilyPond is one of the oldest GNU projects
using GUILE.  So far, its attempts to port from GUILE 1.8 to GUILE 2.0
have crashed and burnt (current state is inexplicable scoping problems
and crashes in random locations).  As a consequence, it will get removed
from Debian next February when Debian discontinues support of GUILE 1.8.
LilyPond's lead developer (yours truly) has been banned from posting on
the GUILE developer list years ago.  There have been few private offers
from GUILE developers to help with the porting, but after being provided
the necessary information, the contacts have gone dead.

LilyPond is the only GUILE-based GNU project that I know of that
integrates Scheme as tightly into the basic system and language as it
would be expected from Emacs, defining dozens of native data types in
C++.  And it does not even have the Elisp/Scheme discrepancy to deal
with.

It is an actively maintained project with dozens of developers and
thousands of users and will disappear from Debian-based distributions
next year.

If Emacs developers would happen to fall from grace and/or the GUILE
developers get tired of dealing with the expectable host of problems and
just stop answering calls because of the initial enthusiasm wearing down
under a lack of man power, I don't see what would promise a
substantially different ending there.

-- 
David Kastrup