Re: Guile potentially changing its GC a second time

[Kevin Barry]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 03:37:43AM +0100, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> Had anyone seen this??

No, but it's not surprising: Guile sometimes seems to be a one-person
hobby project. It's not a project that cares much about breaking things
for its users.

> https://github.com/wingo/whippet-gc
> 
> This looks like something we will need to watch. If Guile
> switches from BDWGC to whippet-gc, I really hope LilyPond
> won't need too much adapting and crazy debugging, but only
> God knows. If even...

One of the great things about Linux - and a major contributor to its
success - is its golden rule of never knowingly breaking anything (in
userspace).  If it works today it has to work tomorrow. You aren't
allowed to break it, *even* if you're fixing something more important.
I wish more projects were like it (especially where I work).

To practically answer your question: I don't think there's much we can
do: we are more or less at the mercy of the Guile project. I'm tempted
to suggest we add some tests that might catch breaking changes to
Guile's GC, but of course our most recent issues were on Windows only,
so our automated testing wouldn't have caught them anyway.

Perhaps we could describe some manual tests that get run on new releases
of Guile? (It's probably less work than rewriting LilyPond from scratch
with a different embedded language :D.)

Kevin

> 
> There is quite a bit of chat about it on
> 
> https://wingolog.org/
> 
> Jean
>