Re: Better support for transition to guile-1.6

[Tom Lord]

       The guile-1.6 release will be a real pain for many application
       developers.

       The transitions between versions up till now have been reasonably
       smooth.  Between 1.4 and 1.6, large parts of the API has
       changed.

There are some parts of the design of Guile that are very limiting,
at least for some applications.  These include:

        The use of the C stack to hold the current continuation.

        The conservatively-oriented GC interface.



It would be nice if Guile had the freedom to change those details
without impacting client programs.  

If there aren't many people who care about the API to Guile, then
changing the API can happen anytime, with impunity.

If there are many people who depend on a reasonably stable form of the
current API, then it might be a good idea to design a new API, and a
compatability interface for the current API on top of that.

But if there are many people who will soon have to make large changes
to the way their programs call Guile, then perhaps this is a good
time to carefully design a stable and flexible API that can survive
even as the implementation(s) evolve.

-t