Re: State of LilyPond with Guile 2.2

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwenn@gmail.com> writes:

> It seems that most of the core work on GUILE is done by a single
> person (Andy Wingo).

Last time I looked at commit history and mailing list usage, the
"development version" of Guile was exclusively Andy Wingo's domain and
he did not communicate with anyone on publicly available channels about
what he was doing, and the changes were partly of the back-and-forth
kind for experiments that may or may not fail.

Anyone else was constrained to "stable" branch work.  Which very much
consisted in bugfixes, but also comparatively well-defined additions and
changes that would properly belong in a development branch except that
there is no such thing outside of Andy Wingo's domain.

Bug fixes in the stable branch might or might not make it into the
development branch.

There was some cohesion of the Andy and non-Andy work into the 3.0
release (which was after some of the few non-trivial other developers
like Mark Weavers left the project in frustration).  I have not followed
development since then and don't know what happened afterwards.

> If he leaves the project for one reason or another, is there anyone
> who can productively get things done on the GUILE codebase? I don't
> think I am confident about becoming versed in Scheme enough to tinker
> with an optimizing compiler written in a dynamically typed language.

If there is a compiler bug or design problem to get fixed, I guess
that's curtains or workaround time.  Outside of the compiler, there have
been significant fixes, but the number of people willing to invest work
here has shrunk.

> Not being able to use 64-bit addressing on Windows with GUILE 1.8 is
> an extremely serious problem.

I was of the opinion that we distributed a 64-bit version here?  Or did
I get that wrong?

-- 
David Kastrup