guile-kernel

Guile kernel for Jupyter Notebook (Written and tested with GNU Guile 2.0.11)

Note: Buffer size in guile-simple-zmq is set to 4096 bytes, so code in a Jupyter cell should be shorter than this! In case you need longer code, increase BUF-SIZE in guile-simple-zmq.

Note 2: [FIXED] jupyter notebook 5.6.0 waits for 1 minute after start.

Example

Installation

Docker

If possible use the docker image. It uses guile-3.0.

$ docker build -t guile-kernel .
$ docker run -p8888:8888 guile-kernel

See messages in the console and open a link similar to http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=.... in the browser.

Local installation

How to get GNU Guile version 2.0.12 or later (https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Obtaining-and-Installing-Guile.html):

$ wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-2.0.12.tar.gz
$ tar xvf guile-2.0.12.tar.gz
$ cd guile-2.0.12
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

The jupyter notebook is a client and the jupyter kernel is a server. They exchange data with messages placed into message queues provided by ZeroMQ library (http://zeromq.org/). I tested this kernel with ZeroMQ-4.2.1.

How to install it:

$ wget https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/releases/download/v4.2.1/zeromq-4.2.1.tar.gz
$ tar xvf zeromq-4.2.1.tar.gz
$ cd zeromq-4.2.1/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Headers and content of data in a message are streamed in json format. To work with this format, guile needs the library - guile-json. How to install it:

$ wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/guile-json/guile-json-3.2.0.tar.gz
$ tar xvf guile-json-3.2.0.tar.gz
$ cd guile-json-3.2.0
$ ./configure --prefix=<guile-prefix>
$ make
$ sudo make install

It can be tricky, I needed to install some additional packages in order to build this library. guile-prefix - is a folder which you need to specify in order to put the library to right place. Folders where guile searches for libraries are:

$ guile -c '(display %load-path) (newline)'

To place guile-json to /usr/share/guile/site/ folder I executed $ ./configure --prefix=/usr

In order to get ZeroMQ messages, guile needs another library - guile-simple-zmq

git clone https://github.com/jerry40/guile-simple-zmq.git
cd ./guile-simple-zmq
autoreconf --verbose --install --force && \
./configure --prefix=/usr
make && make install

Kernel setup

According to the article, the kernel can be placed into different loactions:

	Unix	Windows
System	/usr/share/jupyter/kernels /usr/local/share/jupyter/kernels	%PROGRAMDATA%\jupyter\kernels
Env	{sys.prefix}/share/jupyter/kernels
User	~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels (Linux) ~/Library/Jupyter/kernels (Mac)	%APPDATA%\jupyter\kernels

Choose one of them and create there a folder guile. After that copy files from src folder of thos repo and edit file kernel.json this way: replace ### with the full path to the folder guile you created):

{
    "argv": ["guile", "-s", "###/guile/guile-jupyter-kernel.scm", "--", "{connection_file}"],
    "display_name": "Guile",
    "language": "scheme"
}

Example:

{
    "argv": ["guile", "-s", "/home/jerry/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/guile/guile-jupyter-kernel.scm", "--", "{connection_file}"],
    "display_name": "Guile",
    "language": "scheme"
}

After this, start Jupyter Notebook and check if the guile kernel is visible by it.