Guile's platform support

Posted Dec 17, 2024 15:01 UTC (Tue) by tome (subscriber, #3171)
In reply to: Guile's platform support by gray_-_wolf
Parent article: Using Guile for Emacs

The README file in guile-emac's Codeberg repo has a partial list of platforms unsupported by guile, including

> Ardent, Ultrix, ConvexOS, OpenIndiana, 32-bit OS on SPARC64, GNU/Linux Alpha

and mentions a two-layer effort for guilemacs:

> * guile-emacs that continues to rebase ontop of vanilla emacs.

> * opinionated guilemacs, that builds furhter ontop of guile-emacs, removes unwanted stuff, less target platforms, enabler for more radical ideas.

so, basically soft and hard forks of emacs, with the hard fork forsaking many platforms.

Xemacs was a hard fork of Emacs created to do things Emacs didn't and wouldn't do, which lasted until Emacs eventually did do those things too. If "opinionated guilemacs" takes off with enough enthusiasm, one can imagine a similar process playing out over a period of years.

Guile's platform support

Posted Dec 17, 2024 15:03 UTC (Tue) by tome (subscriber, #3171) [Link]

See https://codeberg.org/guile-emacs/guile-emacs#headline-31

Guile's platform support

Posted Dec 17, 2024 22:46 UTC (Tue) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (2 responses)

How would anyone know if ConvexOS support is broken? AFAICT no hardware has shipped running that OS since 1995. I doubt you can find a system simulator for it. The machines that ran it were measured in cubic metres (and kilowatts of power).

I'm all for fun retrocomputing, but supporting necrocomputing is not something that should hold any project back (see recent article on Rust, Git and Nonstop)

Guile's platform support

Posted Dec 18, 2024 9:27 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Agreed. Platform support shouldn't even be considered for platforms where you don't have at least one developer with access to the platform to perform tests on that platform. I would have thought that should be obvious but it seems some of these projects bend over backwards for obscure niche platforms that last fulfilled that requirement decades ago (or never did as in that Nonstop platform).

Guile's platform support

Posted Dec 18, 2024 14:10 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I think those are platforms which GNU Emacs supports (or did run on them, the last time anyone checked) but which Guile has never supported.

I'd guess the odds are pretty good that if you took a current GNU Emacs tarball you could still build and run it on your ConvexOS system, if you had one (or Alpha, or whatever). Emacs hasn't explicitly removed support for them as there was no particular need to do so. The Guile-Emacs docs are being explicit that these won't be a target for the new project.