Re: GSoC: Emacs Lisp support for GNU Guile

[Daniel Kraft]

Andy Wingo wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> On Tue 31 Mar 2009 12:44, Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > as already discussed briefly with the Guile guys behind the new VM
> > thing, I got the idea to implement Emacs Lisp as supported language for
> > the Guile VM system.
>
> This sounds great! I'd love to assist. As the fellow who's hacked most
> on Guile's VM, I can offer "mentorship" if you like, on the Guile
> side -- though I am not as knowledgable about Emacs as I'd like to be.

Thank you all for the quick replies and offers for mentoring!  I'd be 
really glad to work on this project and hopefully to bring the elisp 
support to guile, which really seems something valuable to the community!

And it seems mentoring won't be any problem...  I'll mention this to the 
GNU guy involved, so hopefully my proposal can finally be accepted.

> > Originally, Guile as the GNU scripting language was designed as a language
> > based on the Scheme lisp dialect; however, as a prime example for use of a
> > scripting language (and with a huge existing base of scripts) Emacs Lisp is
> > another popular lisp based scripting language.  With the new capabilities of
> > Guile, it will be possible to add support of this language to Guile and thus
> > allow it (and all programs using Guile as scripting engine) to be
> > programmed not
> > only in Scheme but also Emacs lisp; thus, it will also be possible to
> > utilize
> > all the existing elisp code for creating even more nifty and useful
> > scripts.
>
> YMMV, but I think that elisp is most useful within the context of Emacs
> itself -- its data types, its libraries, its runtime. So after getting
> Emacs Lisp's semantics to compile, perhaps as a "if time allows" thing,
> defining a Guile implementation of emacs/src/lisp.h would allow Guile to
> slip into Emacs with minimal modification of C sources.

So far I've only thought about elisp as "yet another language" but 
you're of course right, it probably consists mainly (or at least 
importantly) of its bindings to Emacs.  While I've no particular 
experience there (at the moment), the idea to use Zile as test-bed for 
the SoC project and simply for getting started sounds reasonable to me.

> > Communication:
> >
> > Depends on the requests from my mentor / the community, but I think the
> > public development mailing lists and private email should be fine; other
> > ideas
> > are instant messaging / IRC.
>
> I'm often on #guile, with CET as my timezone. Between there and the
> mailing lists we should be good, avoiding private email.

Cool, I'll try to drop in some time near (when I've got some time spare, 
which is unfortunatelly a little spare during the week at the moment)! 
Timezone is CEST for me, too :D

Yours,
Daniel

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