[CM] on guile etc

[Bill Gribble]

On Fri, 2002-06-14 at 07:03, Bill Schottstaedt wrote:
> The advantages are: scheme (via guile anyway) does not make real-time work
> impossible, it is (relatively) small, it is free, the FFI to C is very
> good, and the tie-ins to various user-interface libraries have been
> provided by yers truly; so there's no obvious road-block to further
> development. 

Just to add to this, there is a nice tool called g-wrap that makes it
even easier to handle FFI tasks for guile, and I can't speak highly
enough of the guile-gtk and guile-gnome wrappers.  Combined with
libglade and the glade tool, I can draw a GUI and get it up and running
with no C code at all in a few minutes, or add a bit of C code to speed
up critical bits or wrap an external library, and not sweat about how or
whether it's going to work. 

> The drawbacks are: no compiler and none in sight at this
> time (the interpreter runs at basically the same speed as ACL's
> interpreter), the object system is sui generis and incomplete,
> and guile itself has degenerated into pointless bickering.  

On the object system - if you're talking about GOOPS, I wouldn't say
it's incomplete but that's just a matter of taste; I really like it. 
Yes, there's pointless bickering, but at least people who are bickering
are interested enough to bicker :) and the process is gradually working
its way towards something better, I think.  

b.g.