@c -*-texinfo-*-
@c This is part of the GNU Guile Reference Manual.
-@c Copyright (C) 2008
+@c Copyright (C) 2008, 2010, 2011
@c Free Software Foundation, Inc.
@c See the file guile.texi for copying conditions.
Only some of those features remain in Guile. There were ongoing
tensions between providing a small, embeddable language, and one which
-had all of the features (e.g. a graphical toolkit) that a modern Emacs
+had all of the features (e.g.@: a graphical toolkit) that a modern Emacs
might need. In the end, as Guile gained in uptake, the development
team decided to focus on depth, documentation and orthogonality rather
than on breadth. This has been the focus of Guile ever since, although
Since then, Guile has had a group maintainership. The first group was
Maciej Stachowiak, Mikael Djurfeldt, and Marius Vollmer, with Vollmer
staying on the longest. By late 2007, Vollmer had mostly moved on to
-other things, so Neil Jerram and Ludovic Courtès stepped up to take on
-the primary maintenance responsibility.
+other things, so Neil Jerram and Ludovic Court@`es
+stepped up to take on the primary maintenance responsibility. Jerram and
+Court@`es were joined by Andy Wingo in late 2009.
Of course, a large part of the actual work on Guile has come from
other contributors too numerous to mention, but without whom the world
@itemx 1.2 --- 24 June 1997
Support for Tcl/Tk and ctax were split off as separate packages, and
have remained there since. Guile became more compatible with SCSH, and
-more useful as a UNIX scripting language. Libguile can now be built as
+more useful as a UNIX scripting language. Libguile could now be built as
a shared library, and third-party extensions written in C became
loadable via dynamic linking.
@item 1.3.0 --- 19 October 1998
Command-line editing became much more pleasant through the use of the
readline library. The initial support for internationalization via
-multi-byte strings was removed, and has yet to be added back, though
-UTF-8 hacks are common. Modules gained the ability to have custom
-expanders, which is still used for syntax-case macros. Initial Emacs
-Lisp support landed, ports gained better support for file descriptors,
-and fluids were added.
+multi-byte strings was removed; 10 years were to pass before proper
+internationalization would land again. Initial Emacs Lisp support
+landed, ports gained better support for file descriptors, and fluids
+were added.
@item 1.3.2 --- 20 August 1999
@itemx 1.3.4 --- 25 September 1999
A long list of lispy features were added: hooks, Common Lisp's
@code{format}, optional and keyword procedure arguments,
@code{getopt-long}, sorting, random numbers, and many other fixes and
-enhancements. Guile now has an interactive debugger, interactive help,
-and gives better backtraces.
+enhancements. Guile also gained an interactive debugger, interactive
+help, and better backtraces.
@item 1.6 --- 6 September 2002
Guile gained support for the R5RS standard, and added a number of SRFI
threads, providing true multiprocessing. Gettext support was added,
and Guile's C API was cleaned up and orthogonalized in a massive way.
-@item 2.0 --- thus far, only unstable snapshots available
-A virtual machine was added to Guile, along with the associated
-compiler and toolchain. Support for internationalization was added.
-Running Guile instances became controllable and debuggable from within
-Emacs, via GDS, which was also backported to 1.8.5. An SRFI-18
-interface to multithreading was added, including thread cancellation.
+@item 2.0 --- 16 February 2010
+A virtual machine was added to Guile, along with the associated compiler
+and toolchain. Support for internationalization was finally
+reimplemented, in terms of unicode, locales, and libunistring. Running
+Guile instances became controllable and debuggable from within Emacs,
+via Geiser. Guile caught up to features found in a number of other
+Schemes: SRFI-18 threads, module-hygienic macros, a profiler, tracer,
+and debugger, SSAX XML integration, bytevectors, a dynamic FFI,
+delimited continuations, module versions, and partial support for R6RS.
@end table
@node Status
Still, even with an all-Guile application, sometimes you want to
provide an opportunity for users to extend your program from a
language with a syntax that is closer to C, or to Python. Another
-interesting idea to consider is compiling e.g. Python to Guile. It's
+interesting idea to consider is compiling e.g.@: Python to Guile. It's
not that far-fetched of an idea: see for example IronPython or JRuby.
-And then there's Emacs itself. Though there is a somewhat-working
-Emacs Lisp translator for Guile, it cannot yet execute all of Emacs
-Lisp. A serious integration of Guile with Emacs would replace the
-Elisp virtual machine with Guile, and provide the necessary C shims so
-that Guile could emulate Emacs' C API. This would give lots of
-exciting things to Emacs: native threads, a real object system, more
+And then there's Emacs itself. Though there is a somewhat-working Emacs
+Lisp language frontend for Guile, it cannot yet execute all of Emacs
+Lisp. A serious integration of Guile with Emacs would replace the Elisp
+virtual machine with Guile, and provide the necessary C shims so that
+Guile could emulate Emacs' C API. This would give lots of exciting
+things to Emacs: native threads, a real object system, more
sophisticated types, cleaner syntax, and access to all of the Guile
extensions.
HCoop / bpt / guile.git / blobdiff