Re: My Guile TODO list

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Ludovic,

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I occasionally talk about my large Guile TODO list, and sometimes people
>> say that I should put it somewhere public.  Okay, here it is (not
>> including my ticked messages in Gnus).  It includes some items that are
>> probably controversial, especially near the end,
>
> Obviously I stopped reading here and hit C-M->.  :-)

LOL :)

> I’ll just pick one item:
>
>> * FFI overhaul
>>    * Native code generation where possible, else generated C code
>
> For ‘pointer->procedure’, we could use GNU lightning to generate subrs,
> which would save us from the need to go through ‘foreign-call’.

If someone wants to work on this, I'd be glad, but personally I'm not
interested in integrating GNU lightning.  This TODO list item assumed
that we'd first have our own native compiler, even though I forgot to
put "native compiler" on the list.

> This would make things equivalent to hand-written subrs in terms of
> performance.  I’m not sure it’s crucial, though.

A faster FFI would enable us to use it for many more things, including
for frequently-called procedures where performance is crucial (such as
GMP or libunistring), but I think it can wait until we have our own
native compiler.

    Thanks,
      Mark