Re: Compiling/running ECMAscript

Hi Benjamin,

 From what I remember, I think this feature was never properly 
completed. In the manual, it says:

> ECMAScript 
> <http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-262.pdf> 
> was not the first non-Schemey language implemented by Guile, but it 
> was the first implemented for Guile’s bytecode compiler. The goal was 
> to support ECMAScript version 3.1, a relatively small language, but 
> the implementer was completely irresponsible and got distracted by 
> other things before finishing the standard library, and even some bits 
> of the syntax. So, ECMAScript does deserve a mention in the manual, 
> but it doesn’t deserve an endorsement until its implementation is 
> completed, perhaps by some more responsible hacker.
>
I tried it very briefly a while ago, and couldn't even get a fairly 
basic program to run. I don't know if any work on it has been done on it 
since then, but I haven't heard of anything.

Thanks,
James.

On 26/12/2025 17:06, Benjamin Acevedo wrote:
> Hello. I see that the guile compiler supports ECMAscript, but I can't
> seem to get my js programs to compile or run.
>
> There's some info in the user manual where you can say:
>
> ```
> guile --language=ecmascript -c <expression>
> ````
>
> The manual says the -c flag evaluates this as a Scheme expression.
>
> If I have a main.js file with the only contents being:
>
> console.log('hello, world')
>
> and say:
>
> ```
> guild compile main.js
> ```
>
> This is the output I get:
>
> main.js:1:0: warning: possibly unbound variable `console.log'
> main.js:1:20: warning: possibly unbound variable `world'' wrote
> `/home/me/.cache/guile/ccache/3.0-LE-8-4.7/home/me/Code/js/main.js.go'
>
> I'm using guile version 3.0.11. I just can't seem to figure out how to
> compile/run javascript programs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> Thanks so much. Please let me know if you need any additional info.
>