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Re: Is guile byte-code compiled?
At 12:25 Uhr +0200 23.05.1999, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:
> Since Guile is supposed to be an application scripting language you
> don't want it to be too large. If you use BC, you need both a BC
> compiler and a BC interpreter, which increases the size of the
> system. (Look at Scheme48 or RScheme. They are really huge compared
> to Guile.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there might be an additional issue. The
current interpreter ensures that scripts are distributed as source. I
have the idea that this is one significant influence on the culture
around a language; just witness the differences between the Perl and
Java communities. Perl is -- almost by necessity -- much more about
sharing code than Java is.
Seen from another angle, a source code interpreter has the advantage
that there's just one representation of a script. I take BC to mean
compilation to the virtual assembly language of some VM, an operation
that's hardly reversable. In my opinion, it is a desirable property of
scripting language implemenations that changing a script means editing
a text file and _nothing_ beyond that.
Michael