Re: Why is Elisp slow?

[Stefan Monnier]

I totally agree with the sentiment; we'd benefit from "out-sourcing" the
maintenance of the language implementation, but we can't just replace
Elisp with something else, so we need to find another well-maintained
Elisp implementation that's at least as good as that we have now.

AFAIK the options are:
- Keep what we have
- Move to Guile
- Move to CLISP
- Move to SBCL
CLISP is not actively maintained nowadays.
AFAIK SBCL is alive and kicking, but I'm not sure how well it works on
platforms other than GNU/Linux-on-AMD64.

Of course, Guile has the advantage that someone has already spent a fair
bit of time implementing support for Elisp, whereas for CLISP and SBCL
that would be extra work (Elisp is close to a subset of CL but not
quite).

Another approach would be to implement an Elisp-to-JS compiler and
then use one of the heavily-optimized JIT-compilers for JS.
Compiling Elisp to JS should be much easier than compiling to
native code.


        Stefan