How to Develop New Guile Libraries

• Crafted Emacs has a new co-maintainer and RC1 coming soon!

  Welcome to new co-maintainer Stefan Thesing! Stefan has been helping out a lot on Crafted Emacs documentation lately, so we're excited to have him on board.

  Check out Jeff Bowman's post with more news here: https://write.as/jeffbowman/crafted-emacs-update-for-august-and-another-new-teammate

• GNU 40 Year Anniversary Event

  https://www.gnu.org/gnu40/

Today we're going to experiment with using Guile Hall and Guix to create a new Guile Scheme library from scratch! Guile Hall is a tool that can create a complete Guile project even with its own Guix packaging configuration.

• https://gitlab.com/a-sassmannshausen/guile-hall
• https://rednosehacker.com/hall-a-project-manager-for-the-guile-programming-language

To test out the development workflow with these tools, we'll write a simple URL route handling library like you might see in a minimal web programming framework (think Express.js, Flask, etc).

/api/things
/api/things/{thingId}/doSomething
/api/widgets/{widgetId}

The goal will be to produce a simple library with basic tests and then consume it from a Guile Scheme script inside of a guix shell which has our Guile library installed!

# Creating a project
cd ~/projects
hall init --author "Your Name" project-name -x

# Initializing the project build
cd project-name
hall build -x
guix shell -Df guix.scm -- autoreconf -vfi && ./configure && make check

# Building the project for development
guix shell -Df guix.scm -- make check

NOTE: The guix.scm file that is written out for --type local is wrong by default! Change source to (local-file "project-name-0.1.tar.gz")

To use your library as a Guix package:

# Make the local tarball
guix shell -Df guix.scm -- make dist

# Run a guix shell with the library installed
guix shell -f guix.scm guile # The guile part is needed!

Now you can load up your module in an arbitrary script!

Check out the code we created at this repository:

https://codeberg.org/daviwil/guile-routes-demo