Re: Likely a good frog project for someone with C knowledge

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 3:38 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Compile Lilypond with
> -DSCM_DEBUG_TYPING_STRICTNESS=2
>
> The guile documentation states quite clearly
>
>  -- C Type: SCM
>     `SCM' is the user level abstract C type that is used to represent
>     all of Guile's Scheme objects, no matter what the Scheme object
>     type is.  No C operation except assignment is guaranteed to work
>     with variables of type `SCM', so you should only use macros and
>     functions to work with `SCM' values.  Values are converted between
>     C data types and the `SCM' type with utility functions and macros.
>
> Now the Lilypond code base is chock full of code comparing SCM values.
> And it likely also contains a number of cases where C types (like
> booleans) and Scheme type are getting mixed up.

The abstraction that guile uses is not that tight.  I would start
worrying about this once the GUILE team starts actually using the
constraints mentioned in the above snippet.  Given the current release
rate of Guile, I wouldn't be too worried.

> But with the current code base, cleaning this all up is going to be a
> lot of work.  Not hard to do, but a lot.

The only real problem are boolean conversions because they are very wrong,  ie,

  SCM x = ...
  if (x)  {
    ..
  }

for the rest, making lilypond SCM typing clean is just a lot of work
with no benefits at all.

(and I am speaking as a GUILE developer here as well)

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen