Guile

When working on the interface to notmuch I stumbled upon the case where iterating over messages and iterating over filenames produced the same code structure only changing the functions being used. I hate to see code duplication and thus I went out exploring for solutions available in Guile to solve this issue.

Manually creating the bindings for a sizable C program is a lot of work, also it is not very rewarding. I’m lazy and don’t want to do that. I looked around for what other options I have and I was surprised about the solution.

On the previous post I covered how I can call external programs as new processes and interact with their inputs or outputs. Here I will use directly the foreign libraries written in C using Guile’s foreign function interface . In this series of posts I record how to use Guile as a scripting language and solve various tasks related to email work.

Most of the pre-processing work of my emails was already solved with a combination of a bash script, which uses the notmuch cli and the python package afew . However, I’m learning Guile and I need a real task to solve to practice the language.

In my personal project to learn LISP, I decided to try GNU Guile . It is a Scheme implementation and it is the official extension language of the GNU project . To learn, my first step is to actually use it, and my first minimal toy project, will be a Habit tracker.