Re: portability

From: Jim Blandy <jimb_at_cyclic.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 16:28:39 -0500

(I maintain Guile for the FSF.)

I'm always kind of torn when I see other healthy projects in
competition with Guile. Obviously, I think Guile is cool, and I want
it to be wildly successful, but there are other systems (STk and
GNUstep are at the top of my list) that are quite winning, and quite
definitely in competition with Guile. It seems like a waste to have
people working on code which will probably never be portable among the
three.

GNUstep is obviously very different from Guile and STk, since it's
based on Objective C. And I think Guile and STk have different
philosophies too. For example, Erick seems to put a lot of effort
into making STk a clean, powerful, and extensible system. Those
things are important, but I'm more excited about having Guile link
with everything --- databases, sound cards, 3D graphics libraries,
E-mail systems, etc. (Sorry if this isn't an accurate representation
of your goals, Erick; I'm just guessing based on the STk traffic I
see.)

It's difficult to predict which tactic is "best". Who knows --- maybe
Guile will die a horrible death under the weight of its own hairy
code. Maybe people will get bored of STk because it doesn't have that
OpenGL interface they really want. You go with what turns you on.

In the long run, I'd rather have all of them out there than have one
single project, because it means that the general idea we all have in
common is safe, no matter who actually wins, and that the users have a
choice about what's most important to them.
Received on Fri Jan 10 1997 - 22:28:10 CET