Re: why doesn't gimp use guile?

[Jeff Read]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 12:12:36PM +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Hi all,
>    I'm new to the list, guile seems like a
> kick ass idea but how come its not used by
> more apps?
> 
>    Why does GIMP use SIOD instead of Guile?
>    Would Guile be better for GIMP?
>    What needs to be done to Guile to make
>    it be what GIMP needs?
> 
> I don't understand why every app doesn't use
> Guile so I'm taking GIMP as an example.

An excellent question! From my perspective there are two forces at work here:

1) Guile was not very mature at the time GIMP 1.0 came out. SIOD had been 
around for many more years, was smaller and faster, and had a GPL-compatible 
license. The GIMP team was willing to forgo RnRS compliance (and put up with 
quirks like set! returning a value) to take advantage of these features.

2) Today, the GIMP team seems to be deprecating Scheme in favor of Perl. Perl's 
syntax makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, but it is the 
darling of the Open Source community, and more people know it than know Scheme.

There was a plug-in called "Gimple" that exposed GIMP's Script-Fu PDB to Guile, 
making GIMP 1.0.x scriptable in Guile. I do not know the current status of 
Gimple for 1.2.x GIMP. Might be an interesting project to revive.
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Read <address@hidden>
Unix Code Artist, Anime Fan, Really Cool Guy

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