Re: Proposal for a Guile binary file format

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar at free-expression dot org>]

On 20 Nov 1999, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:

> Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:
> 
> > I would pay the price of slower loading of uncompiled Scheme source
> > when we would instead have a good compiler that produces binary code
> > that can be loaded fast and executes fast.
> 
> Me too.  This is surely the best way.  It's just that I wouldn't like
> to wait for another three years before scwm starts quickly on my
> computer.
> 
    Writing a gcc frontend for Scheme itself wouldn't be so horrible, I
think.  The hard parts would be (a) making it binary compatible with
uncompiled GUILE code, and (b) making gcc properly optimize tail
recursion.  Of course there's also (c) making the entire gcc toolchain one
thread-safe function call that can be used on the fly inside the guile
interpreter.

Lynn