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Re: I resign as Guile maintainer


Thank you!

If enough people who agree with this step forward (I have felt so for
a long time (~3 years) but I must confess my own cowardice in the
matter), I think that would be a big step forward.

I agree that SCM is slick, but it is inappropriate for the task at
hand (IMHO of course).

forcer writes:
 > [i cut off most of the extra recipients - this mail is more
 > important to the guile list than to anyone else]
 > 
 > Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:
 > 
 > > [...]
 > > it is a clear signal that something is wrong with
 > > the Guile project and that something needs to happen.
 > >
 > [...] 
 > >
 > > Now, what's going to happen with Guile?  Is it dead?  Or merely ill?
 > > Is its illness infectious?
 > > 
 > > I don't know.  I'm kind of emotionally attached to Guile, because it
 > > is the project that was my ticket into the Free Software community.  I
 > > still have the letter from the FSF pinned to my wall that I got when
 > > signing over my copyrights.  So, it's hard for me to just let Guile
 > > die.
 > 
 > Same for me - i'm just hoping for a chance to commit some bigger
 > change so a copyright signover would be feasable :]
 > 
 > > I never really resonated with other Scheme implementations either.  I
 > > slowly began to think that SCM was a good choice as the basis for rms'
 > > goals of a universal extension language, although I didn't understand
 > > it in the beginning.  Its design decisions fit well with being a
 > > library in a C world, and yet it is efficient and makes no
 > > functionality compromises.  So, I don't think Guile is fundamentally
 > > technically flawed.
 > > 
 > > In my opinion what's wrong with Guile is that it develops more and
 > > more into a patchwork of half working concepts.
 > 
 > That's the one big problem. And it's not a surprising one, given
 > such comments as "we need a maintainer that's not afraid of eval"
 > or "once i figured out the internals of guile".
 > 
 > Scheme is a very clean and simple language, and it shouldn't be
 > such a big problem writing an interpreter for it that's halfway
 > easy to understand if you sit down for a few hours and read the
 > source. It's one of the paramount objectives in current software
 > projects - the maintainability. And in my humble opinion, Guile
 > in it's current incarnation fails exactly there.
 > 
 > The evaluator - as astonishing as it is, great work Aubrey - is
 > *very* difficult to understand, even if you know C quite well and
 > sit down for a week. The ifdef's etc. add even more difficulties
 > there, though they are "justified" in eval.c.

There's also too big a relearning curve after one returns to it after
a bit of absence ... if maintaining Guile isn't your day job,
it's a struggle ... (Jim?).

 > The bit-tags are three-layered, if i understood correctly, and
 > not too easy to understand either. The existence of macros to
 > test for types helps a bit, but if you have to check for some
 > bug, it's not *that* easy.
 > 
 > And as Marius pointed out correctly, Guile is a patchwork of
 > half working concepts. It lacks a basic design - it lacks the
 > same thing that made Perl and Tcl the big blobs they are
 > today. Guile has the advantage to be built ontop of a very clean
 > and very nice language, but it slowly grows into a blob itself,
 > because people demand so, and don't think of a good basic concept
 > first.
 > 
 > If Guile is going to be the "one" extension language, it should
 > have very clean, very simple internals. This includes a very
 > clean, very simple facility to extend it. Guile has alot of good
 > ideas, but i think it's partly hampered by it's difficult, non
 > thought-through internals. 
 > 
 > The way it is currently, i won't be surprised if Guile will be
 > completely rewritten (from scratch, probably) by next year.
 > 
 > - The numerical tower will be replaced.
 > - The environments will be replaced.
 > - The module system will be replaced.
 > - The garbage collector will be replaced.
 > - The reader will be replaced.
 > - We'll have two kinds of heaps.
 > - The evaluator maybe might be replaced (there have been long
 >   discussions of replacing it by a bytecode compile-evaluator
 >   pair).
 > - Most of the stuff in the guile core is slowly being put out into
 >   modules.
 > 
 > Since all those - very good - ideas will be implemented and
 > integrated independently, Guile will retain some legacy code, and
 > eventually will be rewritten.
 > 
 > I hope you didn't mind my rambling here, but i had to say all
 > this, because it was nagging on me for some time now.
 > 	- Jorgen aka forcer
 > 
 > -- 
 > ((email . "forcer@mindless.com")       (www . "http://forcix.cx/")
 >  (irc   . "forcer@#StarWars (IRCnet)") (gpg . "/other/forcer.gpg"))

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