Re: Guile portability question

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

William Brinkman <bobrink@u.washington.edu> asks:
> To start with, I apologize if you do not want to receive personal email
> about Guile.  It is not obvious to me who/where I should ask these
> questions.

That's fine.  You should post them to the Guile mailing list,
guile@cygnus.com.

> Are there any plans to make Guile usable by Win32 developers, other than
> through GNUWin32?  I have not been able to get a straight answer from
> people I know (most are Linux nuts (eg Greg Badros) and don't care).  I
> want an extensible Scheme which is portable to Solaris, Linux, and Win32
> OSs at the very least (probably BeOS too).  I am sortof a multi-platform
> nut, and I think Guile probably depends on the whole GNU universe far too
> much for me to use.

Actually, I don't think that Guile is wired into the GNU universe so
much.  I think you'll need your own Makefile system if you want to
build with Microsoft's tools, but the code itself isn't too bad.

I'm certainly not opposed to having Guile support platforms other than
Unix, but they're not a priority, and I don't have the expertise to do
it myself.  It basically depends on volunteers with the know-how (like
you, possibly) to design clean patches for the variant OS support, and
submit them.

We're not jerks about this stuff --- if you take the time to submit
patches that are clean and stay out of Guile's way, we're not just
going to knowingly break them and hand the pieces back to you.  But
given limited time, we need to support the Free OS's first.

One of the long-term plans was to segregate the true core of Guile ---
the interpreter, memory manager, and essential R4RS functions --- from
all the system-specific stuff.  Which should certainly make it easier
to port to other OS's.

Good luck!