guile/doc/ref/history.texi

@c -*-texinfo-*-
@c This is part of the GNU Guile Reference Manual.
@c Copyright (C)  2008, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2018, 2020
@c   Free Software Foundation, Inc.
@c See the file guile.texi for copying conditions.

@node History
@section A Brief History of Guile

Guile is an artifact of historical processes, both as code and as a
community of hackers. It is sometimes useful to know this history when
hacking the source code, to know about past decisions and future
directions.

Of course, the real history of Guile is written by the hackers hacking
and not the writers writing, so we round up the section with a note on
current status and future directions.

@menu
* The Emacs Thesis::  
* Early Days::                  
* A Scheme of Many Maintainers::  
* A Timeline of Selected Guile Releases::  
* Status::
@end menu

@node The Emacs Thesis
@subsection The Emacs Thesis

The story of Guile is the story of bringing the development experience
of Emacs to the mass of programs on a GNU system.

Emacs, when it was first created in its GNU form in 1984, was a new
take on the problem of ``how to make a program''. The Emacs thesis is
that it is delightful to create composite programs based on an
orthogonal kernel written in a low-level language together with a
powerful, high-level extension language.

Extension languages foster extensible programs, programs which adapt
readily to different users and to changing times. Proof of this can be
seen in Emacs' current and continued existence, spanning more than a
quarter-century.

Besides providing for modification of a program by others, extension
languages are good for @emph{intension} as well. Programs built in
``the Emacs way'' are pleasurable and easy for their authors to flesh
out with the features that they need.

After the Emacs experience was appreciated more widely, a number of
hackers started to consider how to spread this experience to the rest
of the GNU system. It was clear that the easiest way to Emacsify a
program would be to embed a shared language implementation into it.

@node Early Days
@subsection Early Days

Tom Lord was the first to fully concentrate his efforts on an
embeddable language runtime, which he named ``GEL'', the GNU Extension
Language.

GEL was the product of converting SCM, Aubrey Jaffer's implementation
of Scheme, into something more appropriate to embedding as a library.
(SCM was itself based on an implementation by George Carrette, SIOD.)

Lord managed to convince Richard Stallman to dub GEL the official
extension language for the GNU project. It was a natural fit, given
that Scheme was a cleaner, more modern Lisp than Emacs Lisp. Part of
the argument was that eventually when GEL became more capable, it
could gain the ability to execute other languages, especially Emacs
Lisp.

Due to a naming conflict with another programming language, Lee Thomas
suggested a new name for GEL: ``Guile''. Besides being a recursive
acronym, ``Guile'' craftily follows the naming of its ancestors,
``Planner'', ``Conniver'', and ``Schemer''. (The latter was truncated
to ``Scheme'' due to a 6-character file name limit on an old operating
system.) Finally, ``Guile'' suggests ``guy-ell'', or ``Guy L.
Steele'', who, together with Gerald Sussman, originally discovered
Scheme.

Around the same time that Guile (then GEL) was readying itself for
public release, another extension language was gaining in popularity,
Tcl. Many developers found advantages in Tcl because of its shell-like
syntax and its well-developed graphical widgets library, Tk. Also, at
the time there was a large marketing push promoting Tcl as a
``universal extension language''.

Richard Stallman, as the primary author of GNU Emacs, had a particular
vision of what extension languages should be, and Tcl did not seem to
him to be as capable as Emacs Lisp. He posted a criticism to the
comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, sparking one of the internet's legendary
flamewars. As part of these discussions, retrospectively dubbed the
``Tcl Wars'', he announced the Free Software Foundation's intent to
promote Guile as the extension language for the GNU project.

It is a common misconception that Guile was created as a reaction to
Tcl. While it is true that the public announcement of Guile happened
at the same time as the ``Tcl wars'', Guile was created out of a
condition that existed outside the polemic. Indeed, the need for a
powerful language to bridge the gap between extension of existing
applications and a more fully dynamic programming environment is still
with us today.

@node A Scheme of Many Maintainers
@subsection A Scheme of Many Maintainers

Surveying the field, it seems that Scheme implementations correspond
with their maintainers on an N-to-1 relationship. That is to say, that
those people that implement Schemes might do so on a number of
occasions, but that the lifetime of a given Scheme is tied to the
maintainership of one individual.

Guile is atypical in this regard.

Tom Lord maintained Guile for its first year and a half or so,
corresponding to the end of 1994 through the middle of 1996. The
releases made in this time constitute an arc from SCM as a standalone
program to Guile as a reusable, embeddable library, but passing
through a explosion of features: embedded Tcl and Tk, a toolchain for
compiling and disassembling Java, addition of a C-like syntax,
creation of a module system, and a start at a rich POSIX interface.

Only some of those features remain in Guile. There were ongoing
tensions between providing a small, embeddable language, and one which
had all of the features (e.g.@: a graphical toolkit) that a modern Emacs
might need. In the end, as Guile gained in uptake, the development
team decided to focus on depth, documentation and orthogonality rather
than on breadth. This has been the focus of Guile ever since, although
there is a wide range of third-party libraries for Guile.

Jim Blandy presided over that period of stabilization, in the three
years until the end of 1999, when he too moved on to other projects.
Since then, Guile has had a group maintainership. The first group was
Maciej Stachowiak, Mikael Djurfeldt, and Marius Vollmer, with Vollmer
staying on the longest. By late 2007, Marius had mostly moved on to
other things, so Neil Jerram and Ludovic Court@`es stepped up to take on
the primary maintenance responsibility. Neil and Ludovic were joined by
Andy Wingo in late 2009, allowing Neil to step away, and Mark Weaver
joined shortly thereafter.  After spending more than 5 years in the
role, Mark stepped down as well, leaving Ludovic and Andy as the current
co-maintainers of Guile as of January 2020.

Of course, a large part of the actual work on Guile has come from
other contributors too numerous to mention, but without whom the world
would be a poorer place.

@node A Timeline of Selected Guile Releases
@subsection A Timeline of Selected Guile Releases

@table @asis
@item guile-i --- 4 February 1995
SCM, turned into a library.

@item guile-ii --- 6 April 1995
A low-level module system was added. Tcl/Tk support was added,
allowing extension of Scheme by Tcl or vice versa. POSIX support was
improved, and there was an experimental stab at Java integration.

@item guile-iii --- 18 August 1995
The C-like syntax, ctax, was improved, but mostly this release
featured a start at the task of breaking Guile into pieces.

@item 1.0 --- 5 January 1997
@code{#f} was distinguished from @code{'()}. User-level, cooperative
multi-threading was added. Source-level debugging became more useful,
and programmer's and user's manuals were begun. The module system
gained a high-level interface, which is still used today in more or
less the same form.

@item 1.1 --- 16 May 1997
@itemx 1.2 --- 24 June 1997
Support for Tcl/Tk and ctax were split off as separate packages, and
have remained there since. Guile became more compatible with SCSH, and
more useful as a UNIX scripting language. Libguile could now be built as
a shared library, and third-party extensions written in C became
loadable via dynamic linking.

@item 1.3.0 --- 19 October 1998
Command-line editing became much more pleasant through the use of the
readline library. The initial support for internationalization via
multi-byte strings was removed; 10 years were to pass before proper
internationalization would land again. Initial Emacs Lisp support
landed, ports gained better support for file descriptors, and fluids
were added.

@item 1.3.2 --- 20 August 1999
@itemx 1.3.4 --- 25 September 1999
@itemx 1.4 --- 21 June 2000
A long list of lispy features were added: hooks, Common Lisp's
@code{format}, optional and keyword procedure arguments,
@code{getopt-long}, sorting, random numbers, and many other fixes and
enhancements. Guile also gained an interactive debugger, interactive
help, and better backtraces.

@item 1.6 --- 6 September 2002
Guile gained support for the R5RS standard, and added a number of SRFI
modules. The module system was expanded with programmatic support for
identifier selection and renaming. The GOOPS object system was merged
into Guile core.

@item 1.8 --- 20 February 2006
Guile's arbitrary-precision arithmetic switched to use the GMP
library, and added support for exact rationals. Guile's embedded
user-space threading was removed in favor of POSIX pre-emptive
threads, providing true multiprocessing. Gettext support was added,
and Guile's C API was cleaned up and orthogonalized in a massive way.

@item 2.0 --- 16 February 2010
A virtual machine was added to Guile, along with the associated compiler
and toolchain. Support for internationalization was finally
reimplemented, in terms of unicode, locales, and libunistring. Running
Guile instances became controllable and debuggable from within Emacs,
via Geiser. Guile caught up to features found in a number of other
Schemes: SRFI-18 threads, module-hygienic macros, a profiler, tracer,
and debugger, SSAX XML integration, bytevectors, a dynamic FFI,
delimited continuations, module versions, and partial support for R6RS.

@item 2.2 --- 15 March 2017
The virtual machine and introduced in 2.0 was completely rewritten,
along with much of the compiler and toolchain.  This speeds up many
Guile programs as well as reducing startup time and memory usage.
Guile's POSIX multithreading was improved, stacks became dynamically
expandable, the ports facility gained support for non-blocking I/O.

@item 3.0 -- January 2020
Guile gained support for native code generation via a simple
just-in-time (JIT) compiler, further improving the speed of its virtual
machine.  The compiler itself gained a number of new optimizations:
inlining of top-level bindings, better closure optimization, and better
unboxing of integer and floating-point values.  R7RS support was added,
and R6RS support improved.  The exception facility (throw and catch) was
rewritten in terms of SRFI-34 exception handlers.
@end table

@node Status
@subsection Status, or: Your Help Needed

Guile has achieved much of what it set out to achieve, but there is
much remaining to do.

There is still the old problem of bringing existing applications into
a more Emacs-like experience. Guile has had some successes in this
respect, but still most applications in the GNU system are without
Guile integration.

Getting Guile to those applications takes an investment, the
``hacktivation energy'' needed to wire Guile into a program that only
pays off once it is good enough to enable new kinds of behavior. This
would be a great way for new hackers to contribute: take an
application that you use and that you know well, think of something
that it can't yet do, and figure out a way to integrate Guile and
implement that task in Guile.

With time, perhaps this exposure can reverse itself, whereby programs
can run under Guile instead of vice versa, eventually resulting in the
Emacsification of the entire GNU system. Indeed, this is the reason
for the naming of the many Guile modules that live in the @code{ice-9}
namespace, a nod to the fictional substance in Kurt Vonnegut's
novel, Cat's Cradle, capable of acting as a seed crystal to
crystallize the mass of software.

Implicit to this whole discussion is the idea that dynamic languages
are somehow better than languages like C. While languages like C have
their place, Guile's take on this question is that yes, Scheme is more
expressive than C, and more fun to write. This realization carries an
imperative with it to write as much code in Scheme as possible rather
than in other languages.

These days it is possible to write extensible applications almost
entirely from high-level languages, through byte-code and native
compilation, speed gains in the underlying hardware, and foreign call
interfaces in the high-level language.  Smalltalk systems are like this,
as are Common Lisp-based systems.  While there already are a number of
pure-Guile applications out there, in the past users have still needed
to drop down to C for some tasks: interfacing to system libraries that
don't have prebuilt Guile interfaces, and for some tasks requiring high
performance.  With the arrival of native code generation via a JIT
compiler in Guile 3.0, most of these older applications can now be
updated to move more C code to Scheme.

Still, even with an all-Guile application, sometimes you want to
provide an opportunity for users to extend your program from a
language with a syntax that is closer to C, or to Python. Another
interesting idea to consider is compiling e.g.@: Python to Guile. It's
not that far-fetched of an idea: see for example IronPython or JRuby.

Also, there's Emacs itself.  Guile's Emacs Lisp support has reached an
excellent level of correctness, robustness, and speed.  However there is
still work to do to finish its integration into Emacs itself.  This will
give lots of exciting things to Emacs: native threads, a real object
system, more sophisticated types, cleaner syntax, and access to all of
the Guile extensions.

Finally, so much of the world's computation is performed in web browsers
that it makes sense to ask ourselves what the Guile-on-the-web-client
story is.  With the advent of WebAssembly, there may finally be a
reasonable compilation target that's present on almost all user-exposed
devices.  Especially with the upcoming proposals to allow for tail
calls, delimited continuations, and GC-managed objects, Scheme might
once again have a place in the web browser.  Get to it!