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Re: Guile & PR


Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se> writes:

> We seem to be in a quite paradoxical situation:
> 
> On one hand, the current Guile is a very good Scheme interpreter.  It
> is stable and reasonably free of bugs.  It has a lot of functionality
> and is easy to integrate in application programs.
> 
> And my guess is that it is one of the very few fastest Scheme
> interpreters that currently exist.  (My guess is still that it is the
> second fastest after SCM.)
> 
> But we have two problems which make Guile look really lousy:
> 
> 1. Documentation is not completed.
> 
> Even though functionality and solutions to most problems exist, few
> know how to use it.
> 
> 2. Guile startup time is ridiculously long.
> 
> In the recent scripting benchmarks in comp.lang.scheme, Guile gets
> lousy figures, probably because of the startup time.
> 

Well, not a humongous improvment, but the current thing snapshot I
have up (http://home.thezone.net/~gharvey/guile/thing.0.04.tar.bz2)
starts up about twice as fast as the current cvs guile, by moving a
lot from boot(-9).scm into the relevent c files and using Gary
Houston's new ports code (and a somewhat faster gc). I haven't looked
at the modules bits yet, mainly because there's only so much you can
do (and I really want to have a gengc to play with by April ;).
 
> I don't have time to work on this, but here are two suggested remedies:
> 
> 1. Is it possible to give more people write access to the module
>    guile-doc?  I understand why it is important to restrict write
>    access to the code sources, but I think it would be OK to let a
>    wider range of people access the manual.

After the discussion that started up about documentation (when I
brought up the projects list), I've been meaning to try and get
something coordinated in this regard (but again, with projects
software [which I hope some other suck^H^H^H^H person will take up ;')]
and the gc, it would be stupid for me to offer to help coordinate
this)... basically, something like the quick documentation I have up,
but in texinfo bite-sized pieces for each source file; this wouldn't
make for a perfect manual (though it does make for a decent reference
manual... I've found the bits I've documented so far invaluable when
writing actual code), but would make writing a full manual more a job
of finding appropriate examples and putting the pieces together
coherently, which is doable by one person... documenting all of guile,
on the other hand, is probably not feasible for a single person doing
this on their spare time (well, it is, but it will take quite a
while).

-- 
Greg