Re: Optimising Elisp code [again]

[Garreau, Alexandre]

On 2018-10-09 at 15:28, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
>>> Cannot one have a three-layer architecture,
>>> C, compiled Lisp, interpretated Lisp?
>>
>> It’s already like this… or what are you
>> talking about otherwise? We got C, which
>> interprets directly both byte-compiled and
>> interpreted lisp, which is all the
>> high-level stuff.
>
> Isn't there an FOSS CL compiler around one can
> duplicate/modify?

gcl. It’s GNU, it uses gcc (for now it generates C and compile that with
gcc, but it was planned to make it a gcc frontend a long time ago, but
iso support comes first afair).  The only other compiler I know is the
most used/popular (afaik), sbcl, but it’s not GNU (so it would be less
meaningful since there are a bunch of GNU lisp implementations)… and
clisp has a *VM* too (and its byte-compiler), but I guess it’s better
than emacs’ one.

However if you’re talking about using a cl compiler to host emacs,
*iirc*, rms said cl was too big for emacs which he wanted not too big
(and indeed, unless some modifications are maid, afaiu, it might imply
to make gcc a mandatory dependency of emacs, which is pretty big)…

Interestingly, on my (debian stable) system, gcl [0] appears to be 7,8M
(but there is a 15M gcl static library [3]), emacs [1] 11M, and libguile
[2] 1,6M… so is gcl smaller than emacs (also maybe it is the static that
contain all gcl, and maybe gcl should be bigger when everything is
complete and standard?)? I can’t measure clisp as I didn’t attempted
(yet) to recompile here, and it’s not packaged for the current debian
stable.

Btw, what would it change to make emacs hosted by gcl, compared to by
guile (modulo the obvious facilities of having elisp and cl more near
than elisp and scheme)? would the gcc runtime dep hard to remove? would
that be so big? would that be easier to get buffer-local variables,
dynamic scoping, et al?

[0] resolves to /usr/lib/gcl-2.6.12/unixport/saved_gcl 
[1] /usr/bin/emacs25-x
[2] /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libguile-2.0.so.22.8.1
[3] /usr/lib/gcl-2.6.12/unixport/libgcl.a