Guile & PR

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se>]

We seem to be in a quite paradoxical situation:

On one hand, the current Guile is a very good Scheme interpreter.  It
is stable and reasonably free of bugs.  It has a lot of functionality
and is easy to integrate in application programs.

And my guess is that it is one of the very few fastest Scheme
interpreters that currently exist.  (My guess is still that it is the
second fastest after SCM.)

But we have two problems which make Guile look really lousy:

1. Documentation is not completed.

Even though functionality and solutions to most problems exist, few
know how to use it.

2. Guile startup time is ridiculously long.

In the recent scripting benchmarks in comp.lang.scheme, Guile gets
lousy figures, probably because of the startup time.


I don't have time to work on this, but here are two suggested remedies:

1. Is it possible to give more people write access to the module
   guile-doc?  I understand why it is important to restrict write
   access to the code sources, but I think it would be OK to let a
   wider range of people access the manual.

2. One quick fix which would have a large impact on loading time would
   be to implement the module-eval-closure (see boot-9.scm) as a
   primitive procedure which could be used in the "standard" case.

   If anyone is interested in improving Guile startup time, he can
   have a look in boot-9.scm how these work, simplify the algorithm
   (since the current one is too general), and implement it in C code
   (which should be put in modules.c).

   If this is done correctly, I promise to put it into the Guile
   sources immediately.


BTW, is it possible to let Guile dump a boot image on systems which
support that?  I have a vague memory that it interfered with dynamic
linking..., but it would really improve things a lot.

/mdj