Re: Is Elisp really that slow?

[Stefan Monnier]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
> I've been advocating this Elisp-ish C for a long time.  Even on your
> stint as maintainer I offered my implementation of my own C-with-sexps
> language.

Damn!  That doesn't ring a bell :-(

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
> I'm interested on islotating certain parts of Elisp, add some stuff to
> help the optimizers and feed it to LLVM. Ideally, an Elisp hacker
> working within those limits could implement some cpu-intensive code that
> would perform similar to C with minimal retraining. At the same time,
> the language must retain enough expressiveness to bring significant
> advantages on development over C. defmacro is a must.

Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu> writes:
> Yes, I thought about this as well! That would
> be so cool and, as you say, interesting!
> Only one would keep the Lisp syntax, right?

Of course, there's the question of how what this language should look
like, but I think more importantly, there's the question of how its
compiler is used:
- can any random Emacs user download your elisp-ish-c code and run it
  with the same ease as if it were written in Elisp?
- I.e. does it require re-starting Emacs?
  Does it require installing a C compiler or some such external tool?
  Does it work on all the architectures supported by Emacs?
- can incorrect elisp-ish-c code cause your Emacs to seg-fault?


        Stefan