Re: guile-emacs GC (was special forms)

[Jim Blandy <jimb at red-bean dot com>]

> Seriously, I think we have to make some restrictions on Lisp
> programs so they don't keep Scheme values.  I think people of
> Guile Emacs do not want to write new programs in Lisp, so it's
> not a problem.  If people of Lisp want to use Guile's features,
> it is the time to move to the Guile-based Emacs.

Honestly, this doesn't seem like a good idea.  There are zillions of
useful Emacs Lisp functions that are part of Emacs right now, and it
would be a fatal mistake to push a design which doesn't encourage the
Lisp and Scheme worlds to share data freely.

The best approach is to change Emacs Lisp to use Guile objects.  That
is, Fcons (if I remember correctly) should call SCM_NEWCELL, and so
on.  That way, the two languages operate on a common GC, and can share
data freely.

Ken Raeburn has already done a lot of this work.  You really should
look at his patches.