Re: Contributions to Guile

[Chad Albers]

Hi Ludo,

Thanks for getting back to me.  I am most interested in remedying the
pain points that I have encountered while developing guile code.

The pain points I experienced are the following:

a. Simple reference guide.  The guile manual is more of a guide than a
reference...the best way to find information is by grepping it or
google search. I'm thinking API documentation with perhaps examples.

b. More robust documentation system - texinfo is not the greatest. And
it's non-trivial to generate any documentation (including texinfo) for
modules.

c. A real packaging system...includes specification, package
retrieval, and package hosting, package search.  Finding and including
third-party guile code is difficult at best.

d. An easier build system. I see most projects using autoconf and
make. Using build tools designed for the C language presents a higher
barrier to those that want to contribute libraries to the guile
community.

e. Refactors - I have a _long_ list in my head, but here's one: the
"ice-9" namespace is cute but confusing to the beginner I once was.

Please don't take these of criticisms of the project per se.  These
are simply the pain points I encountered when I move from other Lisps
(schemes and clojure) into guile. I'm inclined to take on the more
technical/coding tasks like c, d, e.

I'm not sure any of these tasks are a priority for the guile project.
Most of the technical task match my use case - using guile as a
full-fledged scheme interpreter rather than as an extension language.
I'm throwing them out there to determine if any of them are priorities
that would be welcome contributions.

Chad
--
Chad Albers


On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 4:32 AM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Chad Albers <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I have experience with several schemes: Racket, Chibli, Gauche, and Guile.
>> I've started to enjoy Guile the most.  I've written one Guile module (
>> https://github.com/neomantic/guile-beaglebone-io) and I'm about to release
>> another one (mailboxes queues for cross thread communication).
>
> Nice!  You’re welcome to announce releases on address@hidden so
> others can chime in.  :-)
>
>> I'm considering helping out on the Guile project, and there are a number of
>> areas that I would like to work on.   My question is, then, how can I get
>> involved?
>
> Andy Wingo has just written a great article about compiler/VM tasks for
> the forthcoming 2.2 series and for after 2.2:
>
>   http://wingolog.org/archives/2016/02/04/guile-compiler-tasks
>
> In addition to that, everyone can help with the standard library—the
> (ice-9 …) modules, (web …), the POSIX interface in libguile, etc.
>
> We want to include more batteries in general.  So if you think something
> widely useful ought to be in the standard library, you’re welcome to
> propose it here!  And of course, if you find bugs or limitations in
> existing modules, we’re interested in hearing about them and fixing
> them.
>
> Looking forward to receiving your contributions.  :-)
>
> Ludo’.
>
>