A Modest Proposal

[Noah Lavine]

Hello Guile and Clisp developers,

I'm writing to talk about vague big-picture ideas, but please bear
with me for a minute, because I think this could be useful.

I noticed in the recent GNU Summer of Code applications (I'm a mentor
for Guile) that CLisp wants to become embeddable, and embed into Emacs
as a first test case. That would make Clisp an embeddable Lisp
implementation with a bytecode-interpreting virtual machine, compiler,
interpreter, debugger, etc. A very cool thing. Clisp developers might
not be aware that that is exactly what GNU Guile is - a
bytecode-interpreting virtual machine with a compiler, interpreter,
debugger, and collection of useful tools. Guile is already embeddable,
because that was one of Guile's original goals, but the difference is
not so big. Guile also has a summer of code projects to embed itself
into Emacs, in fact.

It seems to me that it is time for Guile and CLisp to consider working
together, because if we don't work together then I think we're both
going to do the same work twice, separately.

This depends greatly on what CLisp's goals are as a project, and I do
not know those. Maybe you have very different goals than Guile, in
which case we might not gain anything by working together. But I do
have a feeling that we are both evolving towards the same place, and
if so, I think it would be nice to cooperate some along the way.

Noah