"what are the differences between resurrected GuileEmacs that was also announced in EmacsConf2024 and Gypsum? At first glance seems like both projects have the same goal."
@ram535 thanks for asking! The goal for both projects are similar, but they are achieved in slightly different ways.
Gypsum is a clone written in Scheme, meaning it is software the behaves exactly like Emacs, but it is written from scratch in a new code base. In this case, it is also being written in a completely different programming language, Scheme instead of C. The larger goal is to have an Emacs that is backward compatible with GNU Emacs but is written in Scheme that runs on any R7RS standard compliant Scheme implementation. There is no C code in this project at all, it is purely Scheme. I would like to also target other compilers such as MIT Scheme, Gambit, Stklos, and possibly Chicken and Larceny as well, though this will be pretty difficult and rely on a lot of cond-expand code. The larger goal is to have an Emacs app platform that encourages the use of the Scheme language for creating applications and text editing work flows, regardless of the underlying compiler.
@lispwitch ‘s “GuileEmacs” is not a clone, but a fork of both GNU Emacs and GNU Guile, meaning it modifies the existing GNU Emacs code base and some of the Guile source base, replacing some of the C source code in GNU Emacs with other C source code from Guile. Then, the Emacs Lisp interpreter written in C is replaced with an Emacs Lisp interpreter written in Guile Scheme. This allows Emacs Lisp to be JIT compiled using Guile’s JIT compiler, and also make use of all of the Guile software ecosystem to extend Emacs. This is incredibly useful, because there is quite a lot of Guile software, including things like web servers and game engines, and soon it could all be available for use by Emacs programmers. It will probably also be production ready much sooner than my Gypsum project because it only needs to implement the core of Emacs Lisp to work. However, it relies on language features specific to Guile to achieve this, so it is not fully R7RS standards compliant, and will not work on other Scheme implementations.
Response from @[email protected]
@ram535 thanks for asking! The goal for both projects are similar, but they are achieved in slightly different ways.
Gypsum is a clone written in Scheme, meaning it is software the behaves exactly like Emacs, but it is written from scratch in a new code base. In this case, it is also being written in a completely different programming language, Scheme instead of C. The larger goal is to have an Emacs that is backward compatible with GNU Emacs but is written in Scheme that runs on any R7RS standard compliant Scheme implementation. There is no C code in this project at all, it is purely Scheme. I would like to also target other compilers such as MIT Scheme, Gambit, Stklos, and possibly Chicken and Larceny as well, though this will be pretty difficult and rely on a lot of cond-expand code. The larger goal is to have an Emacs app platform that encourages the use of the Scheme language for creating applications and text editing work flows, regardless of the underlying compiler.
@lispwitch ‘s “GuileEmacs” is not a clone, but a fork of both GNU Emacs and GNU Guile, meaning it modifies the existing GNU Emacs code base and some of the Guile source base, replacing some of the C source code in GNU Emacs with other C source code from Guile. Then, the Emacs Lisp interpreter written in C is replaced with an Emacs Lisp interpreter written in Guile Scheme. This allows Emacs Lisp to be JIT compiled using Guile’s JIT compiler, and also make use of all of the Guile software ecosystem to extend Emacs. This is incredibly useful, because there is quite a lot of Guile software, including things like web servers and game engines, and soon it could all be available for use by Emacs programmers. It will probably also be production ready much sooner than my Gypsum project because it only needs to implement the core of Emacs Lisp to work. However, it relies on language features specific to Guile to achieve this, so it is not fully R7RS standards compliant, and will not work on other Scheme implementations.