Ideas

[Jonathan Bartlett]

I'm new to the list.  Here are some ideas that I have thought about
implementing if I have the time, but I thought I'd share them here in case
I'm way off-base.

1) A Guile dump()-type function

In order to get compile-time evaluation / run-time evaluation separation,
as well as to make executables work without the GUILE runtime, I was
thinking about implementing a dump/undump mechanism for GUILE.

Basically, have a procedure called (end-compile-time-evaluation)
which would do the following:

  * Save the current continuation in a variable
  * Set a global variable restart_from_continuation
  * call dump()

Then, it would be undumped into a regular executable.  The only change to
guile itself would be to check the restart_from_continuation variable when
starting and call the continuation if it is not null.

This would give the following advantages:

  * Guile would not have to be distributed w/ the app
  * Apps wouldn't have to wait for modules to load before starting, if
they load them before calling (end-compile-time-evaluation)
  * No initialization would be necessary
  * You can do real compile-time programming.

Anyway, it's something I've been thinking about working on, let me know if
I'm wrong-headed or someone has a better idea.

Jon