Re: gnu in summer-of-code: more projects needed

[BT Templeton]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Saluton Brian,
>
> BT Templeton <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I'd like to continue my work on the Emacs Lisp compiler.
>
> Would be great!
>
>> Some areas that could use improvement:
>>
>>  * Implement Emacs-compatible lexical binding support
>
> In what way is the current elisp implementation in Guile not
> Emacs-compatible?

This is a trivial change; Emacs uses the `lexical-binding' variable to
determine the default scope rules on a per-file basis, while Guile-Elisp
provides a `lexical-let' special form.

>>  * Many Elisp subrs are not implemented in Guile-Elisp; some don't make
>>    sense outside of Emacs, but the rest should be provided. I wrote
>>    simple versions of many subrs in Elisp (using guile-ref, etc.), but
>>    only just enough for subr.el to load more or less correctly.
>>
>>  * A more comprehensive testing framework would be nice. For example,
>>    I'd like to be able to run Elisp tests in both Guile and Emacs.
>>
>>  * "Big variables," as proposed in
>>    <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.devel/10750>, would
>>    simplify the implementation, and would also be useful if anyone wants
>>    to implement support for other Lisp-2 dialects in the future.
>>
>>  * Nil needs to be a list, a boolean, *and* a symbol, not just a list
>>    and a boolean.
>>
>>  * Guile-Elisp needs to support aliases and buffer-local variables.
>>
>>  * Guile-Elisp could be a bit faster (Emacs is still faster for the
>>    Gabriel benchmarks), though I assume Guile will do better with code
>>    that uses lexical binding.
>
> This all sounds useful, but I was hoping for something that would get
> the project closer to Emacs integration.  Do you think anything can
> realistically be done in that respect, or is the above already enough
> work?

I think a logical next step would be to update Ken Raeburn's Guilemacs
patches to work with Emacs 24 and Guile 2.0, perhaps in parallel with
the above tasks. I'll include that in my proposal

> If the latter, would you be around after the summer to work on Emacs
> integration?  :-)

Yes. Porting the Generic Window Manager to Guile has been good practice
for that (:

amike,
BT
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