> Hmm... this touches on a political issue I'd been avoiding thinking about. > Namely, adding Guile to Emacs, with Guile's new FFI support, would make > dynamically loading new executable code into Emacs easy, technically, > including non-GPL code written specifically to extend Emacs. There's been a > lot of resistance to that in the past. See for example > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2003-07/msg00403.html .
I haven't thought about the rest of this yet, but I believe what will happen is probably what GCC did to solve this issue. Specifically, there is no problem loading dynamic libraries that define a symbol "this_compiles_with_gplv3", or whatever the specific symbol name is. And checking for such a symbol could certainly be done with Guile's FFI. Of course, whether Emacs wants to be able to load *other* dynamic libraries is a different question. But Emacs would have to face this issue with any FFI, and I think Emacs probably wants an FFI (based on following emacs-devel and thinking about what would make things easier for Emacs), so they can't avoid these questions anyway. So at least Guile isn't making things worse. Noah