wingolog

Greetings, intertubes. I send a brief public missive, mostly because longer ones are beyond my current power.

inspiration

The people of Iraq Veterans Against the War give me great hope.

I've been told that in some Native American cultures, upon return from his first battle, a warrior would be kept isolated from society, isolated from his people, until such a time as he could admit to his experience, to accept it. Only then would his guilt, his sins, be lifted from his shoulders, to be then borne collectively on the shoulders of those who asked him to fight.

That story resonated strongly as I listened to the testimonies of those who fought for what they thought was right, what they were told was right, as they struggle with the realization of the immorality of the entire Iraq invasion and occupation. Their sins are our own.

As the first casualty of war is truth, it is we who have the burden and responsibility of returning truth to war. And, in my interpretation, this truth carries the imperative: bring the troops home. Hear, listen. Heal their wounds.

And prosecute their leaders, those that defrauded the public with lies, those that profit from the murder of the innocent.

My story comes from a talk by Edward Tick, at about minute 50 in episode 361 of Unwelcome Guests. His testimony, in quavering voice, is incredibly moving. I would suggest listening to the Unwelcome Guests program first, then the IVAW winter soldier testimonies.

perspiration

And, in a change of topic... hack!

I decided that Guile needed a decent compiler and virtual machine, and so started to dust of an old project of Keisuke Nishida, helped by fellow Guile hacker Ludovic Courtès. Since then there's been lots of activity, to the point that we now have a working, self-compiling, fast, hackable compiler and VM. I just need to fix source-level debugging and we can probably merge it into core, offering significant runtime, startup time, and memory improvements to all guile code, transparently. Check it out!