Re: emacs roadmap

[Tony Day <zygomega@gmail.com>]

On 17 Dec 2012, at 09:37, Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com> wrote:

> Guile used to be an embeddable implementation of the Scheme programming language, and there was a plan to use Guile in Emacs and rewrite everything in Guile. Guile (since 2.0) is now an embeddable VM and a collection of compilers to that VM. It can run Elisp in the same way that Emacs can.

Thanks - that helps tremendously.  I was mixing up old-school discussions of guile with Guile 2.0.  Lua support coming - wow!

> There has been talk of using the Guile VM in Emacs.
> 

Where would that talk be located?

> As for realism - it's certainly a realistic possibility technically. The work would mostly be in the C part of Emacs - changing lisp.h, the interpreter, and similar things. The low-level Elisp that implements the compiler would also change, but almost all Elisp would be untouched. There would be some technical advantages, and I can think of one possible technical downside. (I'll write more about those if anyone's interested.)

I'd be very interested in your views of both the advantages and disadvantages, for one.