Re: Why is Elisp slow?

[Ergus]

Personally I think is a bad decision go for ECL. It is unmaintained and
performance is not as good that worth the effort. It will be pretty
much the same than going for GCL.

SBCL is very actively maintained and is free and open source why
couldn't we invest some time doing a plugin for our specific use case??
If we ask the maintainers we could even get some help from them?? Is it
more complex than maintain our interpreter and libraries as we are
doing?? Maybe they have some undocumented functionalities we could take
advantage of. If they have FFI they should have some infrastructure
already there, but hidden for normal users (as python does with CTypes
and the python C API).

Actually the bigger problem I see are the buffer local variables and
similar Emacs specific functionalities. (Maybe because I understand
better C than Lisp)

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 10:22:39AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > embed ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp), which
> > * is significantly slower than SBCL, about 2~3x slower? but is still
> >   much faster than Elisp.
>
> Last time this discussion came up, ECL seemed like the most promising
> option indeed, but the performance was not that impressive compared to
> Emacs.  Maybe the situation has changed?
> Also in terms of maintenance, it's minimal, so it wouldn't help very
> much on the side of manpower.
>
>
>        Stefan