1.5.97 first impression

[Rob Browning]

"Jeffrey W. Baker" <jwbaker@acm.org> writes:

> > With respect to the perceived difficulty of writing custom reports,
> > well, all I can say is that I, and my fellow developere, like working
> > with scheme, and intend to keep doing so.  That said, if somebody were
> > to contribute and maintain another language binding, that would be all
> > well and good, but I personally don't feel any need at this point.
> 
> Yeah well I'll push that onto the queue, as it were :)

Also note that there's much work afoot on the guile side these days.
There a good chance that some kind of compilation will be available in
the next 6 months, and I believe that someone is actually going to be
working in earnest on one of guile's oldest goals, that of supporting
other syntaxes directly.  I'm not sure what the first candidate will
be, but there's been at least a little talk of python.

> 1.3.4, which came with my distribution.  I'm not advised on the life cycle
> of Guile development.  Is it prudent to upgrade?  Guppi congratulates me
> on NOT having an ancient Guile when I run its configure script :)

Guile 1.4 is substantially better, and I'd recommend it -- it's
especially notable for faster loading which is one of the things
that's probably biting you.  Guile's actually pretty easy to
build/install, and I'd be happy to help if you need it.  Just ask
here, directly, or on guile-user.

Also we should be getting guile 1.6 out in the next few months, maybe
much sooner, and it should be an even bigger improvement across the
board (including some wonderful doc work from various people who
deserve many thanks).

> Okay I'll have a look at it with strace.  Maybe it is stalling on
> something really stupid like name resolution.

There was apparently also some issue with guppi -- I think maybe it
was reading from /dev/random, and so it won't finish until the entropy
pool has been full enough to generate all the random numbers it
needs.  If things speed up when you move the mouse furiously, then
you'll know that's it :>

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930