Re: Proposal: Deep Dive into the Guile Docs & Makeover Proposal

[Olivier Dion]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2022, Neil Jerram <neiljerram@gmail.com> wrote:

> Personally, I am now a big fan of Scheme-centric + FFI, as it means
> always writing Scheme and never having to hack C code.  If everyone
> agreed on that, we could discard all the C-centric parts of the
> manual, and focus the rest on a clearer use case.  But I very much
> doubt that there is clear agreement on that.  In particular, the
> C-centric usage is really Guile's original reason for existing: to act
> as a universal extension language for lots of GNU programs that
> already exist.

All projects being different, I don't think this is possible.  For
example, I've added Guile bindings for Jami, which is written in C++.
FFI does not have support -- as far as I know -- for C++ std::string,
std::vector<T>, std::map<K, V>.  So it's a necessary to use more than
the FFI module.

I should add that I first started using Guile because of its easy
integration with the C runtime and clear documentation on how to
interlop it.  If it was not for that, I would probably have dismiss
Guile and select Lua instead.

TLDR: I don't think we should discard anything that is C-centric in the
manual.

-- 
Olivier Dion
Polymtl