Hello list, I want to talk about some issues I've encountered with Guile. I'll quickly summarize the points and I'll expand below.
1. Can't connect geiser from emacs to a remote REPL server unless versions match. 2. Documentation extraction sucks. 3. Programs/libraries that use Guile as an extension language are incompatible with one another. If anyone can help with these points I would appreciate it. Keep in mind that I am not a seasoned schemer nor intimately familiar with the GNU Guile manual and it is possible that I've misunderstood something. 1. The easiest OS to hack on Guile is Guix. I don't run Guix so I spinned a VM with it, where I installed guile-next for the bleeding-edge guile. I attempted to run `guile --listen` in the VM and `connect-to-guile` in the (Debian) host, but I'm getting errors, it's not working. I don't quite understand why. The errors seem to be related to version incompatibility, but I don't understand what if anything my host guile package has to do with the guest VM guile package. 2. There's an issue with documentating source code. The best system I've seen is Rust's, but sphinx and Doxygen work fine too. At the very least, a documentation system should have the following features: i. document all language constructs ii. markup (i.e. code blocks, links to other items) iii. exportable Of course there can be more features, such as unit tests in documentation, but I don't consider them essential. I don't know what Guile does. I know there's `guild doc-snarf` and `(ice-9 documentation)` with docstrings, as well as the package documentá (<https://luis-felipe.gitlab.io/guile-documenta/>.) These don't work: - `guild doc-snarf` does something clumsily ONLY with double-semicolon comments. Triple-semicolon file headers that explain the purpose of a module are ignored, for example. It's not clear what the utility of the output of this tool is. - `object-documentation` from `(ice-9 documentation)` only seems to work with docstrings of functions, although it claims to work with macros too, suggesting that the `documentation` property should be set. But how? It's not explained. The info page on "Object Properties" makes it seem like this suffices: (set! (documentation my-function) "the docstring.") but I can't get it to work like that. Docstrings cannot document files. Maybe they can document macros, variables, and modules at least? But the docstring format is raw, there is no markup! - documentá in its page does not include an example of how it works! Not a line of code to explain to the user which documentation is extracted. I could not understand how to use it. 3. I use GNU GDB for debugging. Sometimes there's a desire to be able to interpret byte values in memory. GNU poke allows for this sort of thing. Both programs are very similar in how they behave, and in theory it should be possible to run poke commands from gdb, especially since there's libpoke for this exact purpose. However, this is not possible as far as I've been told, and the reason is that both libpoke and gdb load guile, and therefore, gdb cannot load libpoke in memory because of some issue with the Guile garbage collector! This is terribly disappointing. Can anyone clarify what is going on with this sort of thing? Workarounds so far include compiling gdb without guile support (everyone uses python for scripting in gdb anyway) or dumping byte ranges from gdb and examining them from the poke process separately.
