Guile

Oh, man -- I think I might be the first Guiler on Advogato to announce this: Guile 1.9.0 is out! The 1.9.x series is unstable releases leading up to an eventual 2.0 later this year, and it's packed with enhancements and features that bear evaluation, especially if you've missed them in previous versions of Guile:

• Guile now sports an actual virtual machine, meaning, among other things:
  • Scheme source can be compiled to bytecode for (much) faster loading and evaluation
  • Guile can finally compile and run code in languages other than Scheme! Initial support for ECMAScript 3.1 is included.
• Robust multithreading via SRFI-18
• Syntax-case macros are supported out of the box and maintain hygiene across module boundaries
• Guile is now unicode-aware and has i18n support
• Initial support for R6RS's I/O APIs

Grab the tarball here.

Wow, it's been a while.

SCSS

After practically another year, SCSS 0.3.2 is out. I had to pretty much rewrite the parser from scratch, since the LALR implementation I was using (lalr-scm), while quite good, didn't give me as much flexibility as I needed with regard to error recovery. The new parser is based on the one in WebKit, and, while it's now pretty much 100% compliant with the CSS 2.1 recommendation, it's a bit slower than the LALR one. That's something I'll have to come back to, I guess. And I finally buckled down and added a test suite, at least for parsing -- testing by rendering pages in libRUIN's "ruinview" example program was a real time-sink.

Grab tarballs here.

R6RS Libraries

Another thing I sunk some time into over the past, well, year was trying to get a working R6RS-compatible libraries implementation into Guile. I've been frustrated for a while with the difficulties inherent in porting Scheme modules from one interpreter to another. For a while I thought Snow might be the solution to this, but after months of wrestling with its shortcomings and trying to get people interested in it, I concede that it's probably most useful as a distribution platform -- and R6RS's library specification, however onerous it might be to implement, is most likely to solve the platform-crossing problem. So I spent a while trying to map R6RS's requirements onto Guile's built-in module implementation, and I was almost successful, until some long-standing problems with Guile's management of hygiene across module boundaries reared their ugly heads. I asked the development list for help, and wingo, master of syntax that he is, stepped up and made some serious fixes, which are in the process of being tested and integrated. Guile 2.0, whenever it arrives, is going to have some pretty wonderful things in it.

I joined a LUG

...or, well, a Linux-oriented Meetup.com group. But that's still a big deal for me, as I'd ago given up on finding a serious Free Software presence in New York City (aside from NYLUG, which just... isn't my kind of vibe). At any rate, I found out about this one, The New York Linux Meetup Group while tabling at HOPE with mjording, who's kind of the organizer, I think -- and also a fellow Sunset Parker! They've got a monthly room reserved at 3rd Ward over in a (picturesquely) desolate part of Bushwick. Last month, the meeting included a pleasantly chaotic competitive attempt to develop the same toy web application in four different languages. This time around, I'm told it's just going to be a straight-up hackathon on personal projects, which suits me absolutely fine.

HOPE

Tabling at The Last HOPE was a blast, kind of unexpectedly. I didn't go to any of the talks (although I got to see Jello Biafra's lengthy, meandering keynote on the big projector), but the FSF raised, well, I don't know if it's appropriate to discuss... but it was a lot. And we got a surprising number of requests for ladies' t-shirts.

Shout-outs are due to Matt, Ringo, and Thomas. ...And, grudgingly to Club-Mate. Club-Mate: One Gets Used To It.

SCSS

After almost a year, SCSS 0.3.1 is out. This release features a full-scale code cleanup / reorganization, as well as major changes that improve portability and performance -- the lexer was rewritten by hand, and the pseudo-element handling no longer requires you to manager the style cache yourself. Huge!

Grab tarballs here

SRFI-89

With encouragement from Ludovic, I spent nearly a month (of evenings and weekends) trying to write a more efficient pure-Scheme implementation of SRFI-89, and... failed. In the process, though, I learned a fair amount about Guile's handling of macros and lexical environments. I'm confident Guile will wind up with an SRFI-89 implementation in the near future; it'll just look pretty familiar.

I'll be tabling with the FSF at the HOPE conference tomorrow afternoon between 2:30 and 5:30 and all of Sunday afternoon. Drop by and say hi!