Re: State of LilyPond with Guile 2.2

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> Almost all developers use a Unix-like OS and can be thus served
>> with Guile 1.8.x!  Are there actually LilyPond developers who work
>> natively with Windows or MacOS?  With 'natively' I mean using a
>> binary specifically compiled for that platform and not a virtual
>> box.
> 
> Adding a mix of Guile versions will make the situation much worse
> because we know for sure that 1.8 and 2.2 are sufficiently different
> that it can cause bugs on their own.

While this is true, I believe...

> Claiming support for both will make reproducing issues much harder,
> and things will get outright horrible if, say, we continue to offer
> 32 bit for Windows using Guile 1.8 and 64 bit with Guile 2.2.

... that this is greatly exaggerated.  AFAICS, we have managed that
quite well up to now (partially due to your heroic efforts).

> Also consider what this means for extension writers: They'll have to
> take two Guile versions into account and possibly test both of them.
> I fear this split will be equally bad as Python 2 vs 3 was over
> years...

Are the differences for users really that significant?  Looking into
LilyPond's `scm` directory I only see very low-level stuff that needs
explicit use of `guile-2`.

Note that I don't want that we stay with Guile 1.8 forever, but the
slowness of 2.x and 3.x is a serious issue.  To sacrifice this still
enormous speed advantage just for the sake of orthodoxy seems wrong to
me.


    Werner