What's the status of the new scheme on TeXmacs? Also, what is the status of the new release?

#22

Submitted the issue!

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#23

Fair enough! My understanding is the browser runs some of the code in interpreted mode and some compiled. I was thinking the same thing for TeXmacs, but as you say, that is not necessary.

Is running TeXmacs in webassembly something people are working on?

#24

@yufens is working on the webassembly port of Mogan based on @mgubi 's work.

You can try online via https://mogan.app

To clarify, Mogan is a community driven project. It is not for profit. As a result, the wasm version of Mogan will never require a login.

#25

Iā€™m exploring the design space in Vau (https://github.com/mgubi/vau) which at the moment is going to be a web viewer for TeXmacs files, but which is also a test to see how to ā€œgrowā€ a web application which uses the core of TeXmacs typesetter. In my opinion the full TeXmacs app is not a useful web app. Desktop =/ web and a web app has other requirements and therefore needs another interface, maybe simpler and single window, with less toolbars and relying on HTML+CSS for UI. But I do think that is strategically important that we deliver some functionalities via the browsers, in an app which can be run without installation and possibly which make easy to collaborate.

#26

Found a guile3 cygwin package, I donā€™t have a working Windows though.
http://ftp.cygwin.com/cygwin/packages/summary/guile3.0-src.html

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#27

I donā€™t know much about what the different build options are for Windows. Iā€™ve seen people mention Cygwin, MinGW, MSYS2 and MXE, but Iā€™m not completely sure what they all do.

I see thereā€™s also a Guile 3 packages for MSYS2:
https://packages.msys2.org/base/guile

Yet, thereā€™s also this issue

Then thereā€™s this discussion on MinGW on the Guile mailing list:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2023-01/msg00065.html
and this work in progress git branch:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/log/?h=wip-mingw

I donā€™t know how all of this ties together and what would be needed for TeXmacs on Windows. Perhaps someone with more Windows expertise can chime in?

#28

Both GNU Guile or Chez Scheme are too big for GNU TeXmacs.

We only need a very small subset of the Scheme language. And we do not need most of the standard library shipped by Chez Scheme and GNU Guile.

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#29

Iā€™m not suggesting anybody do this, but was it ever considered to write your own scheme interpreter for TeXmacs?

Again, using emacs-lisp as an inspiration.

#30

@pikachuhy (who is a compiler engineer) was playing on it, see https://github.com/PikachuHy/PicoScheme

For now, I think S7 Scheme is the best solution. And I hope I can spare some time to participate in the development of S7 Scheme.

#31

I insist that S7 is a good tradeoff for the moment :slight_smile: but I was also looking to femtolisp (https://github.com/JeffBezanson/femtolisp) which is currently used in production to run the parsing stage of the Julia language. It seems quite small and fast, but Iā€™m not sure it is fast enough for TeXmacs.

#32

I agree, S7 seems good enough. My initial objection was because I thought it was a dead project. Since thatā€™s not the case, thereā€™s no reason to look elsewhere (except for maybe that weird bug everyone seems to mention).

#33

Some people thought GNU TeXmacs was a dead project.

#34

Itā€™s a reasonable assumption to make when a software is not updated for a while or if the website doesnā€™t work (which was the case for S7). At least TeXmacs has a relatively up to date github; hopefully thereā€™s a new binary release soon too.

#35

I write a new toy scheme, https://github.com/PikachuHy/pscm

One of its goals is to build a windows native texmacs, which means we can build texmacs with MSVC.

I donā€™t know how long it will take.

The first step, I think, is to build Vau (https://github.com/mgubi/vau) with my pscm.

Currently, the wasm version is available: https://pscm.dev/demo.html

#36

Nice project! Please be aware that it is a nontrivial task. Iā€™ve tried to embed other schemes and they are too slow to be usable. For example Chibi. For TeXmacs it is critical to have a fast parser and interpreter and also symbol lookup (because the sources define tons of symbols which have to be resolved during calls). I fear that a naive implementation would be not viable. S7 has a lot of optimisations and even Guile 2 interpreter (written in Scheme and compiled) is too slow for running TeXmacs. One had to wait for the Guile 3 interpreter to match the speed of Guile 1.8.

I looked at femtolisp which is quite fast (even in the benchmarks). If however you insist in want to develop you own scheme then I would like to suggest you try to allow it to work with TeXmacsā€™ strings so that we do not have to convert them back and forth. Joris was also of the opinion that we need our own interpreter.

#37

I looked at femtolisp which is quite fast (even in the benchmarks).

where is the benchmarks code?

try to allow it to work with TeXmacsā€™ strings so that we do not have to convert them back and forth.

good idea

we can do more TeXmacs-specific optimization.

#38

Here: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/

#39

If Iā€™m not mistaken, S7 was specifically written to work well with another software. So going that way for TeXmacs is not a bad idea.

#40

Iā€™m not sure what you mean. S7 has no specific problem to be embedded in TeXmacs. I do not know if it has been ā€œdesignedā€ to work with another software. I do not see any specific design decision which make it bad for TeXmacs. If we can have a performant interpreter which uses TeXmacs internal data-structures that would remove a lot of overhead between C++ and Scheme, but write a good interpreter does not seems an easy task (otherwise there will be more fast interpreters aroundā€¦). Anyway, kudos to @pikachuhy for initiating the project. Let me know if you need help with Vau integration. (btw: Vau does not currently use a lot of Scheme since all the UI part has been disabled, so it is not a good test for a new interpreter). Porting TeXmacs to a new scheme is very easy on the C++ side, it would take some more work to have all the Scheme primitives which are needed to run our Scheme code.

#41

According to their website, S7 was designed as an extension language to their sound editor software.

Iā€™m not saying S7 is unsuitable for other tasks. Just saying that they wrote it to use in their software because no other scheme suited their purposes.