Re: Why is Elisp slow?

[Emanuel Berg]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Also while I much prefer Scheme to Elisp (or
> Common-Lisp for that matter), I'm not looking
> forward to maintaining Emacs packages in two
> (and more) different languages, and other
> maintainers are probably imagining such
> maintenance nightmare with a lot more dread
> than I.

Except for some other advantages with CL
compared to Elisp, which I take it are there
for natural reasons, is the reason CL is much
faster than Elisp, and even as fast as C,
reportedly, using the Steel Bank compiler - is
the reason CL is much faster than Elisp that CL
can be compiled for real, and there is even
a "a high performance" [1] compiler, SBCL,
readily available to do it, *meanwhile* with
Elisp you're stuck with the mere byte-compiler?

So then the first question, literally [2], as
formulated by a wise but in this case ignorant
man, is:

    Why can't Elisp be compiled as well?

> From that point of view, moving Emacs to
> a Common-Lisp implementation would make more
> sense, since there is a chance we can
> *replace* Elisp with Common-Lisp in the
> long-run, rather than adding another language
> on the side.

I think that'd be great, but instead of having
CL on the side (or "Elisp on the side", if you
will) is it unthinkable to add a module _to CL_
so that _CL can deal with Elisp_ with its
usual toolchain?


[1] http://www.sbcl.org/
[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2019-05/msg00008.html

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