Re: Guile - State of 2 / Release of 3

[Thomas Morley]

Am So., 14. Apr. 2019 um 23:01 Uhr schrieb Jahrme Risner <address@hidden>:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I recently saw that Andy Wingo (the primary maintainer of Guile) gave a talk 
> about the upcoming release of Guile 3 (projected for “Spring 2019”).
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/
> https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/guile3fasterprograms/
>
> Currently version 2.9.1 is serving as the beta release for version 3.
>
> For me, this announcement has raised a couple of questions:
>
> 1. What is the state of Guile 2 support right now? I know that there is a 
> configuration command that enables experimental support, but what are the 
> current limitations preventing the adoption of Guile 2 as the default version 
> of Guile?
>
> 2. I understand that part of the issue with Guile 2 was a slowdown in 
> performance due to the way in which LilyPond uses Guile; if substantiated, 
> would the alleged doubling in speed compared to 2.2 place Guile 3 as a better 
> candidate for the version of Guile to replace 1.8?
>
> More generally, if someone was interested in working on Guile support, where 
> would be the best place to start? Also, is there anyone who has been heading 
> the work on moving to a newer version of Guile?
>
> Best wishes,
> Jahrme

Hi Jahrme,

great you're interested in the topic.
I'll try to give you some feedback to your questions.

ad 1.

If you do on master
confirgure --enable-guile2
and apply the attached patches (some are in master already, if in
doubt prefer what's in the source already) you'll get a working
lilypond.
Working means `make´, `make doc´ will succeed and it survives the
regtest with very minor issues, for guile-2.2.x and guile-2.9.1
At least the last time I tested this.

Disadvantges/issues are the slow-down.
Other issues are listed here: https://ao2.it/tmp/lilypond-guile2/TODO
Furthermore `procedure-source´ is disabled in guile-2, which is
problematic for us.
In general we have no method to deal with .go-files.
And we're beaten by encoding-issues.
There's are likely more ...

ad 2.
Though, the slow-down is still huge. I can't confirm a substantielly
speed up for guile-2.9.1

Over the years several people worked on the topic.
Speaking only for me, I think all low hanging fruits are done. And I
don't have the knowledge to go deeper :(
.go-files and encoding-thingies are the heaviest showstopper for now,
all way out of my depth.

If you want to start the above listed issues are the current TODO-list.



Best,
  Harm

patches-for-guile-2-9-1.zip
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