guile/TODO

The Guile TODO List (actually, an -*-outline-*-)

* Protocol

These TODO items are grouped by target release version.  The first group is
the "Eventually" group, which is not associated w/ any particular version.
Items should be initially added to this group, and then later moved under a
version upon either ownership or sponsorship.

Maintainers (w/ write privs) indicate ownership by `[USERNAME]'.  Use
`[ACTUAL-OWNER:MAINTAINER]' to indicate sponsorship, where both elements are
usernames.

Upon completion, simply change the "-" to a "+", but do not delete the item.
At release time, the "+" entries will be deleted after review to make sure
that user-visible changes are reflected in NEWS.


* Eventually

- [after signal handling and threading have been fixed] remove the code
  corresponding to GUILE_OLD_ASYNC_CLICK and the corresponding
  GUILE_OLD_ASYNC_CLICK macro.
- implement and integrate generational garbage collection
- add POSIX thread support
- factor thread support out of libguile
- protect common resources using mutecis from the new interface
- remove the dynamic roots
- revise the fluid implementation
- implement the GC thread synchronization (all threads: go to sleep!)
- implementing the libguileposix threads glue library
- develop better representation for GOOPS objects
- write Orbit CORBA interface
- [after new module system] factor out modules sort.c and random.c should be
  factored out into separate modules
- include malloc debugging code in an optional file in libguile
- fix looking up procedure names in environment in backtraces
- implement srcprops using double cells
- use "real" procprops
- add facilities for easily debugging Scheme programs from Emacs
- write good interface to Tk
- write translators for additional languages
  - Perl
  - Python
  - TCL
  - Emacs Lisp
  - Rexx
- make GDB work with Guile
- use the SCM trick of tagging environments with immediates (see m_letrec1)
  to convert source correctly in unmemocopy
- eliminate argument checking for closures
- Implement a thread-safe alternative to SCM's environment caches
- rename ice-9 to something more obvious
- implement implicitly shared substrings (thread-safe, copy on write).  In
  this context, the concept of read-only-strings might be re-introduced to
  implement the symbol->string semantics of R5RS.
- implement internationalized strings
- revise the uniform vector implementation
- make the set of error signalling functions more consistent
- Fix bug reported by Sven.Hartrumpf@fernuni-hagen.de 2001-08-31:
  (debug-disable 'debug) has no effect if it is the first form in ~/.guile.
- provide a non-extended implementation of 'define' for the R5RS module.


* Before releasing 1.8.0:

- deprecate old uniform vector interface.

- add DLL support [ela]		<-- set by ttn (my bad)

- write emacs/patch.el [ttn]
  + outgoing
  - incoming

+ sync srfi-modules.texi [ttn]

- For GOOPS: [ttn]
  - rewrite method cache management in C
  - rewrite core macros (define-class et al) in C
  - define C API

- Compile with --enable-error-on-warning without failure.  Requires a
  number of fixes, including num2integral.i.c and on some platforms
  gc_os_dep.c.  Also SCM_FIXABLE etc. will produce unavoidable
  warnings on some platforms with some vars as written now.  i.e. on
  alphas, SCM_FIXABLE(some_int) is always true.  We need more
  conditional compilation or similar.

- Move sample .gdbinit in HACKING to somewhere more appropriate (manual?).

- Make sure we have appropriate interface numbers for shared
  libraries, and that we document and use the libtool
  conventions. [rlb].

- Update the version numbers in GUILE-VERSION and README. [rlb]

- Start a new section of the NEWS file.


* Before releasing 1.10.0:

- in boot-9.scm:
  remove deprecated function `feature?<3F>.

- gc.c and gc.h:
  remove deprecated macros SCM_NEWCELL and SCM_NEWCELL2 together with
  their support staffing scm_deprecated_newcell,
  scm_deprecated_newcell2, scm_tc16_allocated, mark_allocated.

- in gc.c and gc.h:
  Remove deprecated functions scm_must_malloc,
  scm_must_realloc, scm_must_free, scm_done_malloc, scm_done_free,
  scm_must_strndup, scm_must_strdup.

- Change return types of smob and port free functions to void.
  They should all return zero by now.

[TODO ends here]