By Andy Wingo. Hacking GNU with Guile I'll start by giving my standard propaganda schtick about guile, and how it can make hacking GNU more like hacking lisp machines. I'll go on like that for about 15 minutes. In the latter 15 minutes I'll do some live hacking. I think what I'd like to show would be live-hacking a web application through emacs and geiser, in which I show what it's like to hack on a running application, what it's like to hack the web in sxml, how to make new bindings to C functions without restarting the process, things like that. Links: - Guile homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/guile

1. Dynamic
Hacking
with
Guile

2. Greetings!
Andy Wingo
http://wingolog.org/
Guile co-maintainer
(along with Ludovic Courtès)

3. Goal
Shameless promotion
To inform, and to entertain

4. Agenda
Brief intro
What are the haps?
Live-hack a twitter-alike
Forward-looking statements

5. What is it? (1)
The GNU extension language
Implementation of Scheme
Embeddable, great C API
Standalone programs
"Scripting"

6. What is it? (2)
Bytecode virtual machine
Compiler, and compiler toolkit
Module set: threads, ffi, web,
goops
Fantastic REPL
Much of this is new

7. What happened in 2010?
Nine 1.9.x releases
* six of which were the last
before 2.0 (oops!)
(One 1.8 release)

8. Awesome new REPL
Debugger on error
Profiler
Tracing and tracepoints
Breakpoints
Source stepping

9. Dynamic FFI
Bind C libraries without C code
Seatbelts not included

10. Prompts
Composable, delimited
continuations
catch, throw implemented in
Scheme
More powerful than call/cc
Process abstractions in userspace

11. Elisp improvements
Clever #nil
* (if #nil "hey" "ho") => "ho"
* (null? #nil) => #t
SoC work from Brian Templeton
Getting closer; needs champion

12. R6RS support

13. Imports from elsewhere
LALR parser generator
* PEG SoC work to be merged
SXML, sxml-match
Statistical profiler

14. Web stack
HTTP URI parsers and serializers
,
WSGI-like abstraction for web
programs
Now that we have web modules,
let's make a CPAN, finally

15. Misc
Futures: fine-grained parallelism
Code coverage
Letrec* for internal definitions

16. The coming 2.0
27 developers
3790 changesets
1,127,437 lines added
792,425 removed
Mostly compatible with 1.8
16 February 2011

17. Peeple
[hack goes here]

18. The Future
CPAN
Native compilation
2.2, 2.4, ...

19. Guile & GNU
Unix or the Lisp Machine?

20. Guile & Emacs
Implement Elisp for Guile
runtime
Allow Scheme (& JS, Lua) in
Emacs
No rewrites
Status

21. Guile & You
Give it a hack!

22. Questions?
www.gnu.org/software/guile
wingolog.org/git/skeleton.git
Thanks for listening!