Re: compiling a scheme module

[Rob Browning]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> writes:

> i think there is some semi-cooled current effort on integrating GNU
> lightning (http://www.gnu.org/software/lightning/lightning.html) into
> guile; perhaps someone here can speak to that.

Right.  This may be a very interesting long-term approach.  For the
short-term, ATM, I tend to believe that guile-hobbit is more likely to
be useful.

> hobbit was slated for integration w/ guile-1.4 but i'm not sure if
> that ever happened.  at this time, it forms the basis of the
> guile-comp project, and probably could use some care and feeding
> (after some stabilizing life-support!).

It didn't make it (and it won't be in 1.6.X either), but if I can fix
up the current guile-hobbit CVS soon to work with guile CVS, then I
think we may want to discuss it for 1.8.0.

> if you are interested in being a guile-lightning (that's what i call it,
> i forget if it has an official name) or guile-comp user, i'm sure those
> hackers would welcome your help in testing things out.  grep the mailing
> list archives (http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/mail/mail.html) for
> starters.  if you are a capable programmer and would like to help out in
> the development of these packages, please feel free to subscribe to the
> guile-devel mailing list and join the fray.

There is a guile-lightning module in guile CVS, and last time I played
with it, it worked.  Marius is the main author, and it's quite slick,
though very limited in functionality right now.

With lightning, as with several of the other possible approaches to
speeding up guile (like byte-compilation), we'll still need a good
scheme form to "lower-level-ops" compiler.  Lightning should be able
to generate machine code once you know what lower-level-ops you want,
but you have to have a compiler to generate those ops.

Also, note that with lightning there's still a portability issue to be
worked on.  Last I looked, it still needed to be ported to a few of
the more common architectures.  That said, I think the JIT via
lightning approach seems quite facinating.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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