Re: Is Elisp really that slow?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>
> Date: Fri, 17 May 2019 01:19:42 +0200
> 
> By refactoring, here, I take it you mean
> a program that is parsing the code, analyzing
> it, and breaking it up, to have neat building
> blocks instead of huge functions, but with the
> same functionality, and all this without or
> with little human intervention?

Refactoring is a large topic.  I suggest to do some Internet search
for something like "tools for refactoring programs".  One of the hits
will be this 10-year old paper, which shows some of what I meant in
practice:

  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ce71/00df509f37e4d1c1fc9fa50f2b98ba035ae8.pdf

> Well, that sounds... advanced! So this is
> something modern IDEs do? :O

Some of them, yes.  A good IDE should support at least some of that.

> To have that for all our programming modes
> sounds like a enormous challenge!

The simplest parts can be based on only rudimentary analysis of the
language, something that we already have in every supported language.

> The only way I can see it work in practice is
> if the refactoring logic could be separated and
> be the same for all languages, so one would
> just have to have parsing language-specific and
> then hook it to the refactoring engine...

Yes.