help-gnu-emacs
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Why is Elisp slow?


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: Why is Elisp slow?
Date: Fri, 03 May 2019 17:00:41 +0300

> Date: Fri, 3 May 2019 14:58:32 +0200
> From: Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> >This is not a problem with Guile, because Guile includes a compiler
> >and interpreter for Emacs Lisp.
> >
> Hi Eli, now I am the curious.
> 
> If that's already done (which sems to be the harder part), where is the
> real problem to migrate to guile? I know there should be many, but what
> are the known ones??

There were past discussions about that, I suggest to look them up.

One of the problems I remember is the basic difference in philosophy
regarding raw bytes in text strings: Guile disallows that, and in many
cases signals errors, while ELisp allows that, and Emacs as a project
is unlikely to change that attitude (while Guile developers seemed to
be convinced theirs is the right philosophy).  Since this directly
affects the internal representation of strings, we have a problem
here.  Maybe this is not the most important problem, but until it's
solved, we cannot even think about moving on.

In general, the integration of Guile into Emacs is simply not finished
yet, not even close.  We cannot land such unstable code on master.
And of course, the longer the guile-emacs project is left as an
unmaintained fork, the more bitrot is accrues, for example it doesn't
support latest Emacs features like bignums in ELisp (although Guile
itself does support that).  In short, without an active team working
on it, this will never happen.  (As everything else in Emacs, except
that this feature is very complex and needs a significant effort.)



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]