Minimal Guile

[Mike Gran]

Hi-

I've been keeping up with some of the discussion on other gnu lists.

One of the criticisms at the moment is that Guile is
 
1. bloated
2. hard to distribute.
 
Re point 2: hard to distribute.
 
A while ago I was looking at the idea of minimizing the number of
files needed to ship Guile as a dependency.  At the time, I thought
that one could retool the build so that it produced
- a tar.gz of the distributable header files
- libguile as a monolithic .so or .dll with no dependencies.
  Dependencies would be wrapped into the monolithic .so or .dll.
- all the compiled .go files as a tar file
- and a Guile executable that used both of the above
 
Guile and libguile would read the .go without unpacking the tar file
by using libtar.
 
There's no real advantage in this for the GNU system, but, it would
make it easier to make a distributable cross-build for non-GNU
systems.  This would make it easier to set up a download repository
of prebuilt .so, .dll, and go-lib tar files.
 
Re point 1: bloated
 
Once the infrastructure for the above is in place, one could set
up an alternate cross-build system that produced a version of
Guile that is
 
- ASCII only, "C" locale only
- Fixnum integers only
- No ability to load ltdl or ffi
- no ability to use whatever libcrypt is used for
 
This would be for the purpose of being a minimalist extension
engine.
 
What do you think?
 
-Mike Gran