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<h4 class="subsection" id="A-Scheme-of-Many-Maintainers-1"><span>9.1.3 A Scheme of Many Maintainers<a class="copiable-link" href="#A-Scheme-of-Many-Maintainers-1"> &para;</a></span></h4>
<p>Surveying the field, it seems that Scheme implementations correspond
with their maintainers on an N-to-1 relationship. That is to say, that
those people that implement Schemes might do so on a number of
occasions, but that the lifetime of a given Scheme is tied to the
maintainership of one individual.
</p>
<p>Guile is atypical in this regard.
</p>
<p>Tom Lord maintained Guile for its first year and a half or so,
corresponding to the end of 1994 through the middle of 1996. The
releases made in this time constitute an arc from SCM as a standalone
program to Guile as a reusable, embeddable library, but passing
through a explosion of features: embedded Tcl and Tk, a toolchain for
compiling and disassembling Java, addition of a C-like syntax,
creation of a module system, and a start at a rich POSIX interface.
</p>
<p>Only some of those features remain in Guile. There were ongoing
tensions between providing a small, embeddable language, and one which
had all of the features (e.g. a graphical toolkit) that a modern Emacs
might need. In the end, as Guile gained in uptake, the development
team decided to focus on depth, documentation and orthogonality rather
than on breadth. This has been the focus of Guile ever since, although
there is a wide range of third-party libraries for Guile.
</p>
<p>Jim Blandy presided over that period of stabilization, in the three
years until the end of 1999, when he too moved on to other projects.
Since then, Guile has had a group maintainership. The first group was
Maciej Stachowiak, Mikael Djurfeldt, and Marius Vollmer, with Vollmer
staying on the longest. By late 2007, Marius had mostly moved on to
other things, so Neil Jerram and Ludovic Court&egrave;s stepped up to take on
the primary maintenance responsibility. Neil and Ludovic were joined by
Andy Wingo in late 2009, allowing Neil to step away, and Mark Weaver
joined shortly thereafter. After spending more than 5 years in the
role, Mark stepped down as well, leaving Ludovic and Andy as the current
co-maintainers of Guile as of January 2020.
</p>
<p>Of course, a large part of the actual work on Guile has come from
other contributors too numerous to mention, but without whom the world
would be a poorer place.
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