Re: Status of the "Project Ideas" page / Summer of Code

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Martin Kuehl" <address@hidden> writes:

> Guile-VM also sounds neat, but I was neither able to compile the code
> from CVS head nor to fetch the revival code from Ludovics arch repo,
> which makes it even harder to devise a plan of action.  Judging from
> the mail thread about its revival, completing the translation from
> Scheme to Ghil and/or from Glil to assembly might be good
> candidates. Another might be comparison with "similar" VMs and ILs
> (the thread
> mentions STklos; s48s "PreScheme" also comes to mind).

To fetch it:

  $ tla register-archive \
    http://www.laas.fr/~lcourtes/software/arch-2004/
  $ tla get address@hidden/guile-vm--revival--0.6 guile-vm

To summarize: the main issue left (and probably the main reason why
Keisuke Nishida never "finished" it) is the integration of first-class
macros.  Preserving the current semantics may be feasible but requires
some thought.  There are a couple of papers available from
library.readscheme.org on the compilation of first-class macros.

Apart from macros, compilation from Scheme to GHIL, GLIL and then
bytecode basically works.  Bytecode interpretation (the VM) is also
roughly functional.

Thanks,
Ludovic.