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Re: I resign as Guile maintainer


Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:

> forcer <forcer@mindless.com> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> This is something that needs to be overhauled. There are a lot of
> things that do. I can understand what you're getting at (I've felt
> much the same way), but I think what we have to keep in mind is that:
> 
> 1) There is, in any large project, a cost to becoming familiar with
>    it. Rewritting everything wouldn't make this cost much smaller,
>    except to the people doing the rewritting. The eventual results may
>    even be more complex.

The problem i was hinting at isn't that it's difficult to get
into Guile internals, but that it's unnecessarily difficult.
As someone else (sorry, forgot the name) hinted, a very clean,
very small core with a stable C API would be sufficient. It just
has to be easily extensible. And the "smallness" should be chosen
from a C programmers' view, since it's a C extension library (as
much as i hate to say it - i prefer coding scheme to c alot).

> 2) Even though it often doesn't seem that way, it is often much
>    quicker to become familiar and build on or fix, than it is to start
>    from scratch.

That's true, and i've checked through quite a few projects in the
past, but Guile makes it unnecessarily difficult to "get" it. One
part of the problem is surely that it's not too well abstracted,
internally. E.g. the evaluator exposes some of it's internals to
the exterior world. But oh well, i just wanted to express what i
felt about the Guile project, i don't want to be the bringer of
evil messages :)
	- jorgen

-- 
((email . "forcer@mindless.com")       (www . "http://forcix.cx/")
 (irc   . "forcer@#StarWars (IRCnet)") (gpg . "/other/forcer.gpg"))

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