Hi Karl, Yes, if the choice of Guile were to reconsider, there would probably be several good alternatives. The problem is that this is quite difficult in the near future, because our task-list is already full with more urgent things...
Best wishes, Joris On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 03:43:42AM -0800, Karl Hegbloom wrote: > A long time ago, I tried out the SCWM (scheme controlled window > manager), which had Guile Scheme as it's extension language. It was > really slow, and difficult to use because of that. Not long after that, > Sawfish, then called Sawmill, was released. It is much faster than > SCWM, and very useable. Soon after I mentioned this fact on the Guile > mailing lists, someone began work on a byte code virtual machine and > compiler for Guile. For some reason, it is not part of the Guile > release right now. > > It turns out that the reason for its performance superiority over Guile > is that rep has a byte compiler and virtual machine. The VM is based on > a technique known as "indirect threading" that was developed for engines > driving portable Forth language implementations. > > Guile does not have a byte code virtual machine. Instead, it is a > tree-code evaluator. This means slower execution and probably (I'm > guessing) greater memory consumption. > > Like Guile, rep was designed to be an embedded extension language. John > Harper, its author, started writing it to create his version of an > Emacs. Later, he used it to implement the Sawmill window manager, now > known as Sawfish. Rep has a fairly decent module system, is easy to > link to C programs, and has both a Lisp and Scheme personality. There > is an evaluator for R4RS scheme as well as one for a lexically scoped > Lisp. The main thing about it is that it's quick. A lot faster than > Guile. > > If TeXmacs is spending much time executing Scheme code, perhaps Rep > would be a better choice? There may be other reasons for choosing it > that I am not completely aware of. One may be the Gnome2 bindings for > it. > > OTOH, if anyone ever finishes up the byte code engine for Guile, and > perhaps the GNU Lightning based JIT... It will be fastest then. > > -- > Karl Hegbloom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > _______________________________________________ > Texmacs-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev _______________________________________________ Texmacs-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev
