Blockers for Guile 2.2

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

Hi all,

I'd like to discuss what are considered blocker issues for a switch to
Guile 2.2.

After the release of 2.23.6, there were reports of major problems on
Windows, namely that the binaries were broken when extracted with the
Windows Explorer (#6281) and that file names with special characters
didn't work (#6282). I think I found solutions for both of them, either
already merged (!1194 for #6281) or in review (!1219 for #6282).

The second large topic was performance of the binaries with Guile 2.2,
which we know will be worse without compiled bytecode. In
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2022-02/msg00099.html
Jean writes
> [Guile bytecode for LilyPond's .scm files] should be added eventually
before we make a full switch.

I don't fully agree and think that bytecode compilation shouldn't block
the switch. In my opinion, it would be fine for the next development
releases to be somewhat slower if that results in Guile 2.2 being
available sooner. The trade-off will be different for a stable release
where we certainly want LilyPond to be as fast as possible. That was
the main reason why I posted about GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE last year, to
have a fallback ready in case we can't get proper compilation working
(and showing that the compiled bytecode gives very similar performance
to Guile 1.8, of course).

What do you think? Are there are other issues that need to be taken
into account?

Jonas

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