customizable application via its extension (and partly implementation) language Emacs Lisp, the community began to consider how this design strategy could apply to the rest of the GNU system. Tom Lord initially began work on an embeddable language runtime named the GNU Extension Language (GEL), which was based on Aubrey Jaffer's Scheme implementation SCM (which in turn was based on George Carrette's SIOD). Lord convinced Richard Stallman to make GEL the official extension language of the GNU project, based on the argument that Scheme was a cleaner Lisp dialect than Emacs Lisp, and that GEL could evolve to implement other languages on the same runtime, namely Emacs Lisp. After Lord discovered GEL had a naming conflict with another programming language, he solicited suggestions for a new name. From several contributions in several Usenet newsgroups, Lord controversially chose Guile from a suggestion by Lee Thomas. During the development of Guile (then GEL) and before its public release, the extension language Tcl was gaining popularity and being pushed as a universal extension language. Stallman saw Tcl as being underpowered as an extension language, and posted a criticism to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, which initiated a flamewar known as the "Tcl War". Since the public announcement of the Guile project coincided with the Tcl debate, it has become a common misconception that Guile began as a reaction to this. After the initial release of Guile, development languished for many years, but 2009–2010 saw major improvements, and Guile 2.0 was released in 2011 with a new compiler infrastructure, a virtual machine implementation, a switch to the Boehm–Demers–Weiser garbage collector, many improvements to the Guile Scheme language, and other major changes. One of the goals of Guile is to allow other languages to be used alongside Scheme, such that Guile would effectively be a language-neutral runtime environment. Various attempts at this have been made in past versions: a dialect of Scheme essentially differing only in its C-like syntax, a translation of Emacs Lisp, a Tcl converter motivated by tkWWW, and something roughly resembling the language Logo. With version 2.0, the project successfully transitioned to a compiler tower approach, allowing the definition of compilers from one language to another, typically from a higher-level one to a lower-level intermediate representation, and eventually virtual machine bytecode or native machine code. On 16 Mar 2017, Guile 2.2.0 was released with a new optimizing compiler and high-performance register virtual machine. According