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What is guile and what is libguile?

Guile is the GNU Extension Language (I'm not really sure if GUILE is an acronym for anything). It started out as an embeddable scheme interpreter, and has rapidly evolved into a kitchen-sink package including an embeddable scheme interpreter, several graphics options, at least two other languages that can be used along with scheme (tcl and ctax), and hooks for much more.

I will not give too much detail on the background and motivations for Guile (see section Useful references); I will just mention a couple of details on what guile and libguile are.

What underlies Guile is a scheme interpreter; the interpreter used is SCM by Aubrey Jaffer (see see section Useful references). Apart from all the fancy new toolkits and libraries, Guile adds to SCM the ability to use SCM as an extension language for C programs.

This estension language programming is easy: you can do it by linking your programs with the C library libguile.a.

People who are using guile today are using it in one of two ways:

• An enhanced SCM: a separate scheme interpreter with all the additions. From the traffic I see in the gel@cyngus.com mailing list, this is what most people are doing.
• An extension language. As far as I know, the Gnudl project is the only one using Guile in this manner.

My understanding from the discussions is that when people talk about guile they are referring to the former, and when they talk about libguile they are referring to the latter.

In this document I will be talking about libguile.

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