Re: libretto and libguile

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

> Anyone have a rough idea if it would be potentially dangerous to use
> libguile and libretto together, by for example wrapping scheme lists
> into libretto lists? For a bloody newbie it sounds very tempting to
> use Lisp wrappers communicate with a portable implementation of
> lists in C, but when considering that even different Lisp dialects
> have communication with each other (as the guile<->elsip discussion
> showed), it could be more likely that someone with the experience of
> Stallman went through the roof when seeing such a messy approach.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean.  Do you mean implementing Scheme
lists using libretto's data structures?

It's difficult messing with the implementation of pairs and lists in
Scheme.  They are pretty critical to the performance of the system.
I'd be reluctant to replace them with something less lightweight.

If one wants to provide a library of general-purpose data structures
for use in Guile, I think it would be much nicer to have them
implemented using Scheme's normal type system; that will mix in more
smoothly with other Scheme code.