Re: Need help starting a project in Guile - distributed DE / GUI toolkit using Wayland

[Neil Jerram]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 01:36, Jan <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I would like to make my project in Guile, but I'm not really an
> advanced programmer yet - I made some hello worlds in C++, simple 2D
> and 3D games in JS using WebGL and I've read basics of Guile from the
> manual and Scheme generally from SICP (few chapters) and other sources,
> made some really simple programs in Guile and packages for Guix.
>
> The problem is I don't know where to start and which parts of the
> language and features of GNU/Linux I have to understand well in order
> to at least make a prototype.
>
> The project idea is a distributed and extensible DE and GUI toolkit
> treating its elements as objects (something like the UNIX philosophy).
> I would like to use Wayland, or if possible wlroots, but there are no
> Guile bindings available.
>
> So for the project I need:
> - a wayland client written in Guile, wlroots (foreign function
>   interface?) I need to talk to the wayland server somehow
> - a good interprocess communication - I want different components of my
>   DE / GUI toolkit to be separated processes talking to each other
>   (POSIX socets?)
>
> Sorry for my vague understanding of the subject, I'm not studying CS.
> I would like to know what should I read/know to make this real.
> Where can I read about programming for an UNIX-like OS?
> Can I avoid learning C/C++ deeply? I know basics of C syntax, but
> I would like to do everything in Scheme, you know, it's much cooler :)
>
>
> Thanks for reading this
>
> Jan Wielkiewicz
>

Hi Jan,

You don't need specially coded Wayland bindings for Guile.  You can use
Guile's generic Foreign Function Interface [1].  For an example, see [2],
although that particular code might be outdated as I haven't run it for a
while.

[1]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Foreign-Function-Interface.html#Foreign-Function-Interface
[2] http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/ossaulib.git/tree/glib/dbus.scm

Best wishes,
    Neil