Re: guile-emacs GC (was special forms)

[Keisuke Nishida <kxn30@po.cwru.edu>]

Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:

> Honestly, this doesn't seem like a good idea.  There are zillions of
> useful Emacs Lisp functions that are part of Emacs right now, and it
> would be a fatal mistake to push a design which doesn't encourage the
> Lisp and Scheme worlds to share data freely.
> 
> The best approach is to change Emacs Lisp to use Guile objects.  That
> is, Fcons (if I remember correctly) should call SCM_NEWCELL, and so
> on.  That way, the two languages operate on a common GC, and can share
> data freely.

I know that it is the right way; however, it takes time.  People and I
do not want to wait that long.  See Ken Raeburn's web page.  It counts
only two hundreds of accesses.  Most people are interested in the editor
which they CAN use without many problems.  I guess that is one reason
why many people have not been interested in merging Guile with Emacs.
I do not like this situation.  I could write a editor that at least
worked fine with Guile.  And I could advertise it with some interesting
facilities such as the GNOME/GTK+ interface.  Then, more people will
come here (I believe).

I do not mean that I am discouraging people from using Scheme data from
Lisp programs.  I just mean it is not that time.  I understand there are
so many useful Elisp programs (including mine), so I encourage people to
use them from Scheme programs.  But the other side is not necessary true
at this moment.  If there are so many people who want to use Scheme data
from Lisp programs, they will do so by replacing the Lisp evaluator with
Guile.  I just think, that is not my work.

> Ken Raeburn has already done a lot of this work.  You really should
> look at his patches.

Yes, I did (about a half year ago), and I appreciate his work.  So I am
not going to do the same work as his.  I intentionally choose a different
approach.  When more and more people get interested in Guile Emacs, that
is the end of my approach and the time to switch to his approach.  If
there were more people who worked on Guile-based Emacs, I did not need
to do this now.