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Comment by s_kilk | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here know of any "real" programs and projects using Guile? Would be curious to hear of any blazing success-stories.

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Lilypond (http://lilypond.org/). Though since guile 2.0 there's been some friction between the lilypond developers and guile developers. Lilypond is still using guile 1.8. There are periodic threads on the lilypond mailing list asking what the hold up is (I don't recall the reasons at the moment).

Edit: This looks to be the issue: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2016-06/msg00...

I think the lack of guile 2.0 support was mentioned as one of the main blockers behind full MusicXML import/export support - this was a couple of years ago though, not sure if that's still true.

There is no such big-ish projects using Guile outside projects embedding Guile and guix. There is no wordpress or even framework as powerful and easy to use as Django or Rails. There is no support for https, it's kind of a no-go if you want to access REST APIs from Guile. Cookie support is not good enough. That said, the creator of Artanis reported some success using Artanis in a commercial setting. Outside that there is various free projects in the work, look at Guile homepage or ask on #guile. On my side I am working on search engine named Culturia.

>There is no support for https, it's kind of a no-go if you want to access REST APIs from Guile.

That is not true. While Guile doesn't support HTTPS out-of-the-box, gnutls ships with Guile bindings. Guix is a notable user of those bindings.

It is preposterous to expect people to write their own HTTPS support on top of something as primitive as GnuTLS!

This attitude towards practicality, if you will, that runs rampant in scheme-land is one of the major barriers for adoption. If you look at Common Lisp, these issues do not exist, the end result being a multitude of substantial real-world projects across a variety of domains (commercial, opensource, academia, industry and so on).

Not so fast, there is an open bug report to move HTTPS support into Guile proper. The (non-trivial) work just needs to be done to make it happen.

The Guile maintainers very much care about usability.

The GNU Artanis[1] web framework seems interesting...

[1] http://web-artanis.com

Here is a brief list https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/#apps

GNU Make has a Guile scripting interface, although distros don't usually ship it compiled into their 'make' packages (for whatever reason). On Ubuntu/Debian, you can get it by installing 'make-guile' instead of 'make'.

I know GDB uses it for plugins.

Do you know of any such plugins?

I don't, I'm afraid. I wouldn't be surprised to find the C++ pretty-printers were written in it, but I have no evidence for that.

They use Python.

Andy Wingo used it for his work on V8.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/v8-users/kIVoA7GZAcY

Although all the plugins I know of are in Python (including some GNU ones, like nice pretty printing of C++ standard library types from gcc)

Guix ? FSMVO "real"

GNU Guix is part of the software deployment process for a pretty complicated speech recognition platform at the company I work for. Thus, I consider it real software.

Do you do fancy logic through Guix or is it "only" the build system ?

Not sure what fancy logic you have in mind. It's a package manager so I have it build packages for me. I also use 'guix environment' as an RVM/Bundler replacement. Guix "just" builds the packages for me, but I am able to package things with much greater speed than with traditional package managers and the resulting binaries are bit-reproducible.

Saying that using guix isn't exactly the same as using guile; even if Guix is a good lever to help your large project.

The project required writing plenty of Scheme code to describe the package recipes. A very non-trivial amount. Why are you so adamant to dismiss what I've done?

It's both non negative[1] and non personal, just an intellectual distinction to avoid giving credit to the wrong object: a language or a tool written in this language. Hoping you're not offended anymore.

[1] I am in no position to criticize anyone this way, and I wouldn't do it anyway.

GnuCash is written in C but uses Guile as an extension language.

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