Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs with S7 Scheme

[Giovanni Piredda]

Am 30.12.2020 um 10:38 schrieb Massimiliano Gubinelli:
> I'm not doing this for the sake of having various implementations. From the 
> point of view of the user there is not much difference. However there are some 
> issues inherent with the use of Guile which I was considering and trying to 
> find alternatives for.
>
> The current situation is the following:
>
> 1) Guile 1.8 is not supported in major Linux distributions. This makes more 
> difficult than it should be for us to keep up to date packages.
>
> 2) Guile 2 is supported in all the major linux distributions, however I'm not 
> sure what happens on Windows. Moreover the performance of Guile 2 for our 
> use-case seems not great, i.e. not better than Guile 1.8. Lilipond, a program 
> which uses Guile much as we do, seems to be still on Guile 1.8 for this reason. 
> I've checked how they do to support Windows and they cross-compile from a Linux 
> machine.

I had either not realized, or forgotten this (despite the fact that I 
use Guile on Linux only, I maybe either did not try to install it on 
Windows, or forgot that I didn't find the Windows executable).

>  From my point of view is unclear what is the best decision for the long term 
> future of TeXmacs. Currently I see two reliable alternatives:
>
> 1) We stick to Guile 1.8. We can just integrate it in our codebase (as we do 
> with PDFWriter) and strip away all the parts we do not need, so that it is 
> easier to maintain and compile in Windows and packageable in Linux.
>
> 2) Follow Guile developers into Guile 3+ and maintain compatibility with Guile 
> 1.8 as a fallback. On Linux we link against Guile 2/3 and on the other 
> platforms we use the best alternative we have.
They might be both ok alternatives. If you (developers) decide on Guile 
1.8, I would see as good to integrate the Guile 1.8 manual in the 
TeXmacs documentation.

A thing which I know almost nothing about is how the "srfi" codes work 
with Guile 1.8. Some of those are nice. Maybe show how to use one of 
them with Guile 1.8? I did not try to place the files somewhere and 
include them in a program, so I do not yet know if they work (and if 
*all of them* work). I do not know how that is related to Scheme 
standards (I have extremely faint ideas about Scheme standards, in my 
mind there is the idea that I can trust the portability of a Fortran 
program under conditions that are respected by common compilers, I did 
not understand how that works for Scheme).

For the S7, I do not have good suggestions, it is too far from the 
things I know about to have even a faint idea about it.

Finally, I appreciate it a lot when I see that the Scheme code that I 
write on Linux runs on TeXmacs on the Windows platform as well, and I 
think it is an excellent feature that one should strive to maintain. I 
do not know how that is related to Scheme standards either.

G.