Re: guile and emacs and elisp, oh my!

[<christian.lynbech@tieto.com>]

I think there are a number of benefits to rebasing Emacs Lisp to a more
commonly used platform, even if this will not be immediately visible to
the casual user, some of the more obvious (as already hashed out in the
other discussions):

   - If elisp is fast enough today, it is to some extent because *lots*
     of functionality has moved to the C world. A faster implementation
     (with a FFI) would allow to take more of the internals back and hence
     allow gerater flexbility and more room for improvement.

   - Developer resources are limited, teaming up with an existing
     platform will provide more hands on the internals and hence free up
     time for the emacs specific work.

   - Having access to a more widely used language will enable non-emacs
     libraries to be imported into emacs or emacs libraries to be used
     elsewhere. For instance the buffer abstraction is one that probaly
     is useful in a number of applications.

I am not able to say if standardizing on a single language platform
across the GNU project makes sense or not. It probably will be very
difficult to decide on one particular language but having a common
platform with multiple languages sitting on top at least will enable a
considerable amount of work to be shared among application development.

It will take time and energy to change the language machinery of Emacs
but we should not forget that a significant portion of that effort has
already been spent and that one also should not underestimate the effort
needed to make the needed high-quality extensions to Emacs Lisp on the
existing implementation and to maintain them afterwards across the vast
score of platforms on which Emacs runs today.


------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)