Re: guile-emacs for gsoc

[Daniel Kraft]

Hi Brian,

Brian Templeton wrote:
> I'm preparing Summer of Code applications and am considering working on
> Emacs-Guile integration. Here's my understanding of the current
> situation, from skimming list archives, source code, etc.:

this sounds great!  I did the current elisp implementation in last 
year's GSoC, so I'd love to see this covered further!  Unfortunatly I 
had nearly no time at all to work on this since last autumn because of 
my studies, even though I would have liked to.

I do not really know about Ken's guile-emacs or emacs itself, but I hope 
I can give you some hints on the "pure" elisp implementation:

First of all, see README in module/language/elisp.  And of course, 
module/language/elisp itself, there's where (nearly) all of it is 
concentrated.

One important open thing I'm aware is "proper" handling of Elisp's nil 
vs. Scheme's #f and '() -- this has been source of discussion for quite 
some while now, and you should find plenty of threads in the archives. 
And another thing is that Guile's "backend" got recently support for 
things like optional arguments, while last summer I implemented this in 
the elisp "front end"; so maybe a good first start (I don't know if an 
easy start, though) could be to switch elisp's implementation to the 
available Guile infrastructure instead.

Of the missing elisp bits, some are mentioned in the README file.  Other 
things, especially what I had in mind as doing "next", would be for 
instance buffer- and frame-local bindings.

I think there may even be some threads in the mailing list archives 
where I wrote some ideas about that; I'm not sure, though.  I think my 
idea was to mark the bindings in a special way (similarly to what is 
currently done for void values) and back them by some kind of hash-table 
that is indexed with the current buffer/frame/whatever on retrieval. 
But if you want to work on that, you will no doubt find a good way to do 
so :)

If you want to work (also) on the real emacs integration, I can not tell 
you anything about that.  But if that's your main focus of interest, 
maybe I can even find some time again during the summer to work on the 
elisp bits and help you that way -- I guess that the emacs work may be 
far more than a single GSoC project...  (I will not apply for Guile as 
GSoC project though, this would be just "for fun" -- more so than GSoC 
already is.)

Happy hacking!

Daniel