Re: GSoC: Emacs Lisp support for GNU Guile

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> Hi Daniel,
>
> On Tue 31 Mar 2009 12:44, Daniel Kraft <d@domob.eu> writes:
>
>> as already discussed briefly with the Guile guys behind the new VM
>> thing, I got the idea to implement Emacs Lisp as supported language for
>> the Guile VM system.
>
> This sounds great! I'd love to assist. As the fellow who's hacked most
> on Guile's VM, I can offer "mentorship" if you like, on the Guile
> side

Thanks, Andy, that's fantastic.  I have little doubt that you would be
a more available mentor than me.  But I'll still follow and chip in!

> YMMV, but I think that elisp is most useful within the context of Emacs
> itself -- its data types, its libraries, its runtime.

I agree, but I think there are some boundaries that could be drawn.
E.g. choosing to use a different GUI approach (or widget set) than
Emacs's own one, but still using all the rest of the runtime and
libraries.

> So after getting
> Emacs Lisp's semantics to compile, perhaps as a "if time allows" thing,
> defining a Guile implementation of emacs/src/lisp.h would allow Guile to
> slip into Emacs with minimal modification of C sources.

I started on that once.  It rapidly started to feel hopeless - but
that was because of the code management aspect - not having Git in
those days, and not having a prior agreement with the Emacs people
that this would be a supported exercise (in some sense).

Now that we have nice code management tools, it should be a lot more
promising!

Regards,
        Neil