On 2024-04-26 03:05:51 -0400, Nikolaos Chatzikonstantinou wrote: > 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?
What you want is:
(set-object-property! foo 'documentation "Contains a @code{'bar}.")
> But the docstring format is raw, there is no markup!
You can write them in whatever markup you want, I personally use texinfo format
(next version of geiser will be able to process and display it nicely).
> - 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.
>
--
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
