Re: Guile is a great idea, but where's the community?

[Thamer Al-Harbash]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Pierre Bernatchez wrote:

> Since Guile seems to have reached a certain initial level of
> maturity as a project, where can I find evidence of a thriving,
> or at least an emerging community of guile users and developers?

OK, here's my guile success story.

I started using guile on a pet project. It's a DHCP suite. The
suite currently ships with a client and a sniffer:

http://dhcp-agent.sf.net/

Unfortunately, thanks to busy work, I had to leave the project in
stasis since the summer. I plan to get back now that the holidays
are nearing.

Traditionally DHCP clients executed shell scripts to setup the
host system. This is kludgy, a result of at least one security
hole, and a shell script cannot talk back to the client much.

With guile and dhcp-agent the user uses the hooks system to
implement hooks per DHCP option. All the options are passed as
strings or a list of strings making it very hard to insecurely
handle a DHCP option.  Finally, and this is the most important
feature, a user is able to call routines in the client from the
scheme script. For example, it is possible to ask the client to
check the latency of a list of IP addresses. With a shell script
such a callback would not be possible.

In other news I've successfully used guile at work for its the
numerical tower and its abritrarily large numbers. It makes
crunching numbers painless and safe.

I think guile is alive and well. The only real issue is
documentation, and that's being generously solved by additional
volunteers. I'm hoping to make time myself to contribute more.

-- 
Thamer Al-Harbash
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