I just ran across an interesting talk on Guile Scheme by Andy Wingo. The talk is from 2009, shortly before Guile 2.0 came out. Wingo discusses the new Guile architecture and plans for a native compiler. One of the most interesting parts for me was the discussion of his plans for Guile to replace the Emacs Lisp engine. That’s still in the future but there’s already an implementation of Elisp that runs on the Scheme VM. Wingo claims that it will make Emacs much faster than it is now and will allow Lispaphobes to customize Emacs in any of the supported languages—Javascript, for example.
It’s a fairly long talk (about an hour and 15 minutes) but it’s pretty meaty and worth the time if you want to know about the future of Guile. Wingo is a pretty impressive guy so, again, I recommend this talk if you haven’t already seen it. You might also want to check out his blog.