Am 30.12.2020 um 10:38 schrieb Massimiliano Gubinelli:
I'm not doing this for the sake of having various implementations. From the
point of view of the user there is not much difference. However there are some
issues inherent with the use of Guile which I was considering and trying to
find alternatives for.
The current situation is the following:
1) Guile 1.8 is not supported in major Linux distributions. This makes more
difficult than it should be for us to keep up to date packages.
2) Guile 2 is supported in all the major linux distributions, however I'm not
sure what happens on Windows. Moreover the performance of Guile 2 for our
use-case seems not great, i.e. not better than Guile 1.8. Lilipond, a program
which uses Guile much as we do, seems to be still on Guile 1.8 for this reason.
I've checked how they do to support Windows and they cross-compile from a Linux
machine.
I had either not realized, or forgotten this (despite the fact that I
use Guile on Linux only, I maybe either did not try to install it on
Windows, or forgot that I didn't find the Windows executable).
From my point of view is unclear what is the best decision for the long term
future of TeXmacs. Currently I see two reliable alternatives:
1) We stick to Guile 1.8. We can just integrate it in our codebase (as we do
with PDFWriter) and strip away all the parts we do not need, so that it is
easier to maintain and compile in Windows and packageable in Linux.
2) Follow Guile developers into Guile 3+ and maintain compatibility with Guile
1.8 as a fallback. On Linux we link against Guile 2/3 and on the other
platforms we use the best alternative we have.
They might be both ok alternatives. If you (developers) decide on Guile
1.8, I would see as good to integrate the Guile 1.8 manual in the
TeXmacs documentation.
A thing which I know almost nothing about is how the "srfi" codes work
with Guile 1.8. Some of those are nice. Maybe show how to use one of
them with Guile 1.8? I did not try to place the files somewhere and
include them in a program, so I do not yet know if they work (and if
*all of them* work). I do not know how that is related to Scheme
standards (I have extremely faint ideas about Scheme standards, in my
mind there is the idea that I can trust the portability of a Fortran
program under conditions that are respected by common compilers, I did
not understand how that works for Scheme).
For the S7, I do not have good suggestions, it is too far from the
things I know about to have even a faint idea about it.
Finally, I appreciate it a lot when I see that the Scheme code that I
write on Linux runs on TeXmacs on the Windows platform as well, and I
think it is an excellent feature that one should strive to maintain. I
do not know how that is related to Scheme standards either.
G.
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