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diff --git a/2024/talks/guile.md b/2024/talks/guile.md index 98e49df8..3c82627b 100644 --- a/2024/talks/guile.md +++ b/2024/talks/guile.md @@ -58,6 +58,75 @@ significant role for Emacs within the GNU Project, becoming a central part of a "Lisp machine for the 21st century". +# Discussion + +## Questions and answers + +- Q: About fibers: My understanding is that the problem with making Elisp concurrent is that none of the data structures (buffer, cons, vector, window etc) are concurrency-safe. How do fibers help with this? + - A: Fibers do not provide thread-safety for any of the existing + data structures. They are useful for building things that + don\'t use Emacs data structures, like a network client that + reads a \"stream\". Fibers can introduce new data structures + that are thread-safe, like \"thread-local buffers\". +- Q: \<ramin\> You mentnioned that Emacs is roughly 25% written in C. + Do you have a rough idea of how much of Guile is written in C? Could + it be an improvement to make libguile a dependency of Emacs? + - A: The problem is not the quantity of C, but that there is C + involved at every single level/layer of computation in Emacs. + This makes it difficult to use concepts like delimited + continuations, that can make it easy to implement Emacs concepts + more simply. + - A: About guile: it\'s about 1/2 C. +- Q: A Common Lisp implementation for Guile sounds really cool! Is there already work on this underway? + - A: Yes, Robin is working on it, but focuses more on research on + how to do a polyglot lisp environnement where elisp and + common-lisp can work together (with lisp 1 vs lisp 2 issues with + different name spaces, package and module system interaction, + \...). If you are interested, the guile project will work on it. +- Q: As someone who\'s kinda new to the concept of Guile, is the + primary goal to transpile Emacs Lisp into Guile bytecode rather than + primarily focusing on adding support for writing code in Guile\'s + Scheme interface in particular? + - A: +- Q: Did switching from guile 2 to 3 give any performance benefits? + - A: Not benchmarking stuff here yet, because guile emacs has too + much overhead involved in conforming to Emacs. Have not noticed + a perceptible change. Based on the Gabriel benchmark results, + it might have benefited a bit, but for Emacs we don\'t know + yet. Lowering the overhead is the best place to focus on to + optimize guile-emacs. +- Q: Do you know if the Emacs maintainers are interested in switching to Guile as the engine for Emacs Lisp? + - A: Previous maintainers were cautiously optimistic and + interested. Issues might be cross-platform compatibility. +- Q: Do you think guile-emacs will be able to use or (collaborate + with) some of the other awesome projects around Emacs-Lisp, like the + gypsum project presented earlier today, or Andrea Corallo\'s efforts + to make Emacs-Lisp more suitable for native compilation? Or even + something like the renewed PreScheme efforts? + - A: Gypsum has a different focus. Guile tries to improve lisp + instead of replacing lisp in any way. But some code can be + shared, especially if some parts of emacs are rewritten in lisp + - A: For libgccjit: it is accelerating the interpreter, which is + not great in the first place. So no direct relationship. + - A: For prescheme: it is a useful tool to look at, making it + easier to upstream one day. +- Q: SBCL, \...You mentioned Robert Strandh\'s SICL along with SBCL---does that work help with the implementation of CL in Guile? + - A: Time consuming part are the DSL from common lisp. So they can + be used. No plan on sharing code yet, as they are open-source. +- Q: Can you comment more on relation with hoot project and advantages + that might bring to guile-emacs? + - A: Hoot is only tested on scheme decompilation. But it is a + completely different project. One could image compile emacs to + wasm and maybe with a different garbage collector. +- Q: + - A: + +## Notes + +- [https://guile-emacs.org/](https://guile-emacs.org/){rel="noreferrer noopener"} +- Some more motivation: avoid FFI to increase performance and allow + for more optimizations (including type annotations) + [[!inline pages="internal(2024/info/guile-after)" raw="yes"]] |