Re: ELisp?

[Noah Lavine]

> Hmm... this touches on a political issue I'd been avoiding thinking about.  
> Namely, adding Guile to Emacs, with Guile's new FFI support, would make 
> dynamically loading new executable code into Emacs easy, technically, 
> including non-GPL code written specifically to extend Emacs.  There's been a 
> lot of resistance to that in the past.  See for example 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2003-07/msg00403.html .

I haven't thought about the rest of this yet, but I believe what will
happen is probably what GCC did to solve this issue. Specifically,
there is no problem loading dynamic libraries that define a symbol
"this_compiles_with_gplv3", or whatever the specific symbol name is.
And checking for such a symbol could certainly be done with Guile's
FFI.

Of course, whether Emacs wants to be able to load *other* dynamic
libraries is a different question. But Emacs would have to face this
issue with any FFI, and I think Emacs probably wants an FFI (based on
following emacs-devel and thinking about what would make things easier
for Emacs), so they can't avoid these questions anyway. So at least
Guile isn't making things worse.

Noah