Re: guile and emacs and elisp, oh my!

[joakim@verona.se]

Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org> writes:

> On Apr 15, 2010, at 04:53, joakim@verona.se wrote:
>> I find this very interesting. Do you have some form of plan how to
>> integrate this form of Guile and Emacs? Can it be done incrementally,
>> that is, can the current elisp system and the guile system coexist in
>> the same Emacs? If so, more hackers could help out with the integration,
>> maybe.
>
> I think I've written up some email in the past (you may have to search back several months) about this.  My project -- changing Emacs to use Guile object types (at least the simplest ones) and Guile's allocator and GC -- can be done somewhat incrementally.  E.g., make sure Emacs uses accessor functions or macros for all uses of type X outside of its own GC system (those changes can be done upstream), and passes around Lisp_Object values rather than pointers to struct Lisp_Foo (likewise), then redefine type X's implementation using more appropriate Guile types, then work on type Y... currently strings, symbols, vectors, and hashes are on my list; individual "misc" and "vectorlike" types can come later, maybe.
>
> I have no intention of getting rid of elisp from emacs, most certainly.  As for eventually replacing the entire Lisp implementation in Emacs with the Guile one, well, I'm hoping that, like Andy suggested, it'll become an obvious win to do so, but if we wind up for a while with two distinct language interpreters (Emacs elisp and Guile VM) but a shared object system and working communication between languages, while Andy madly tries to fix whatever performance problem we might have run into with Guile's elisp implementation :-), I'd be okay with that.
>
> I've recently updated my code to be based on a recent development version of Emacs, though I haven't published the updated version yet and there appears to be some kind of GC problem or something at the moment.  I also haven't got it fully updated for guile 1.9.x (and the upcoming 2.0), which has a different GC system anyways.  (The new GC system is Boehm's GC library.  There was an effort to make Emacs use it some time back, by Dave Love, and I think some of those changes will be needed for Emacs-with-Guile-2.0.  So updating that work might also be helpful?)
>
> But, now that we've got bzr upstream and branching should be relatively easy, perhaps I should clean it up a little and push it all into a branch on savannah, if the maintainers are interested?  If there's really interest in working on it, I'd love to get some help....

I would love to have a look at it! Please push a branch.

> Ken
-- 
Joakim Verona