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Comment by NeutralForest | Hacker News Reader

It's such an amazing project, I wish it used something other than Guile but you can't have everything.

Guile has lots of libraries though, and is the language of Guix. This makes it more likely for people to package their stuff via Guix. Guix itself enriches the ecosystem, and Guile projects can use Guix to make them reproducible.

A few problems remain though. A good debugger, a good macro expander (geiser in Emacs is able to expand somehow), and solving the issues with R6RS library syntax and standard library bindings, are what comes to mind.

Racket's multi-core abilities for a long time were mostly heavy weight (places, starting whole new Racket VMs), except for their implementation of futures, but that one was not always useful. I think recently the situation in Racket has improved, but I don't know, whether it is as good as Guile fibers and futures (which are different from futures in Racket).

Aside from the debugging & testing I already mentioned, going only through guix is a tough sell considering the very tiny amount of people that use it. It's also incredibly slow and doesn't have many packages available. Even for Emacs, it has this weird way of going around Emacs-installed packages (GNU or MELPA channels). Just like Guile docs, it also doesn't tell you of a good way to do things, it only says "here is what exists" with too little guidance imo. It means people have to figure out how to setup things properly on top of all the rest. It makes for a terrible onboarding.

If Guile had more of the "batteries" from the Gauche standard library it might be the perfect all-purpose Scheme. But for just writing a simple application quickly and easily it's been impossible to beat Gauche for me, it's on par with Python and Ruby in that regard IMO.

What kind of application do you write in Gauche?

I am asking, because I might want to get more familiar with it, if it is great for something like GUI or web app. I know there is Guile Golf, but to me it feels unfinished, and I experienced segfaults and crashes, when not doing things exactly as shown in examples and using standard GTK procedures, so that one is kind of out for me, and guile-gi is still changing and seemed kinda complicated to use. On the web front, there is Artanis, but it is too opinionated for me, not a minimalistic framework. Still can build things on top of guile fibers concurrent web server, but then have to build lots of things myself.

Recently, I used Python and tkinter, which works really well, and I would love to have good bindings for tk in Guile.

On my search for Scheme and GUI, I also found stklos, but I have no idea how ready it is and what kind of libraries I would have available, if I built an application with it.

Racket of course also has a GUI framework, that I have tried to use in the past, but it does not have a treeview widget. Has listbox though, with multiple columns.

What does Gauche have to offer, specifically for application development? (GUI, or web, or other)

https://docs.racket-lang.org/rkt-tree-widget/index.html

I should clarify that the "applications" I write are usually command line tools. I don't think I've ever written a full working GUI application, although now with AI I bet it would be fast and easy to bang something together.

> Guix itself enriches the ecosystem

Except that ecosystem Guix provides is not on Windows nor MacOS, making a serious limitation to anyone who wants to develop guile on those platforms.

I support GNU's mission in general, but I find it ironic that when they push freedom of choice you're forced to make the "right" choice or you're left twisting in the wind.

Better focus on developer platforms, than stretch resources too thin. Even if they managed to pull it off, they would need to maintain it. It is quite the different compile target too. Even if Windows was supported, probably many package definitions would have to change to support installing them on Windows. Ultimately, who is to say how Windows updates/MS will break everything? I really don't think they have the resources at this point to pull that one off. How about MS themselves spends time and effort to make things work on their proprietary platform instead, if they want to deliver a very usable platform?

Guile' backtraces are useless to the point it baffles me how the community can work on anything else, or how it's not the first item on any such lists as above.

Other than Guile as in different Scheme implementations? It's usually not too difficult to port things between Schemes. Especially if you use standard R6RS or R7RS library syntax.

Guiles debugging has been a nightmare in the 3.x series. Which is rather surprising since it was probably the easiest scheme to debug in the 1.x days.

It got so bad I moved to racket as my daily driver.

Which LLM works best for Racket?

I found gemini 3 pro to be pretty good.

Overall understanding of the code, code generation capabilities and ability to explain are all pretty good.

Can you say more? Guile's the only scheme I've tried (attempts at packaging for Guix). Debugging has been difficult, but I figured it was me struggling with new tools and API. Does racket have better facilities for introspection or discovery at the REPL?

Yes, since years, all the way when it was still known as Dr. Scheme.

It has a graphical experience similar to the survivors from Lisp is Great days, like LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp, or Clojure with Cursive.

Even better than PLT Scheme with Dr. Scheme, now Raket has ever been?

I have my doubts, given its age.

A different scheme that has great debugging and testing and also better docs.

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