compilation

[Bill Schottstaedt]

> is anybody from the Guile community right now hacking
> Hobbit or some other scheme-to-c compiler for Guile?

In a sense, yes (mentioned in an earlier msg to guile-user);
and I'm very interested in this problem in general -- I've
written a partial Common Lisp->C translator (and a very long time
ago, worked (in PDP-10 assembly language...) on the SAIL
compiler).  I tried Hobbit but did not get much speed-up,
but as previously mentioned, my context is heavily numerical.
And I don't remember (this was a while ago and my memory is
unreliable) any support for "foreign" functions; since I
use Guile almost solely as an extension language, I have
to be able to call my own stuff.  If it isn't included
in the optimized code, then there's no point... The other
problem here is that a "quick and dirty hack" like the one
I'm doing now provides 90% of what I need (in a couple
week's work), and I'm swamped (as is everyone) with
other things to do, so a big project to do it right doesn't
resonate. But, maybe I'd get seduced into helping once it got
started.

(My experience with the Lisp->C translator is that you regret
it in the long run: dynamic loading is an incredible pain,
debugging is next-to-impossible, files end up scattered
everywhere, etc.)