For those who have lost count of the zillions of languages out there, this is a Scheme interpreter/vm that was supposed to become the "official" extension language for GNU projects. It had some publicity in the 90s, but slowed down until recently.<p>Sorry to be simplistic, but so many links here assume everyone is an expert in functional programming; a little context helps everyone understand the importance of a post.
I still don't understand Guile. It makes sense as a stand-alone language implementation, but not as an embeddable one. Why isn't it re-entrant? What about multiple interpreters? Why a C-level GC like Boehm, rather than just track your own garbage? Why scheme for an embeddable language, don't continuations make C interop hard?<p>Even back when they announced Guile, it seemed odd that they based it on SCM rather than on SIOD or TinyScheme.<p>Lua seems to be far superior for embedding. Guile seems big and invasive by comparison. It seems to be heading squarely for that awkward middle size between big/full-featured and small/light that hurt Tcl, as argued in <a href="http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong" rel="nofollow">http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-...</a> .
Guile was RMS' counter-argument to tcl as an extension language back in the days, right? And wasn't it supposed to be a possible elisp replacement, too?<p>It would be very nice if someone could summarize the current state of the language, i.e. why one would use it instead of Racket or Gambit.
Is anyone using guile for any fun project? Or are there any fun projects to work on with guile?<p>I would love to learn Scheme as my next hobby language and guile seems like the way to go with all the things that have started to happen with it lately.