Re: In support of guile-emacs

[taylanbayirli@gmail.com (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> Hello, Daniel.
>
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 07:14:55AM -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>> On 10/19/2015 03:24 AM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> > Hello, Xue.
>
>> > On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 09:07:59AM +0800, Xue Fuqiao wrote:
>
>> >> guile-emacs replaces Emacs's own Emacs Lisp engine with Guile's (without
>> >> breaking backward compatibility).  So:
>
>> >> * Emacs Lisp will execute faster (Guile VM bytecode is more efficient)
>
>> > Just as a matter of interest, approximately how much faster is Guile
>> > bytecode than Emacs bytecode?  Are we talking about 10%, 20%, 50%, a
>> > factor of 2, or even higher?
>
>> > If that speed increase was significant, it might be worth incorporating
>> > Guile's bytecode into Emacs just for that reason, regardless of any of
>> > the other stuff.
>
>> Or simply making completely independent and custom-tailored improvements
>> to the Emacs bytecode compiler and interpreter itself. There's no reason
>> to imagine that the only way to improve performance there is to move to
>> a completely different runtime.
>
> Indeed not.  Lessons could be learnt from Guile, perhaps.  But how much
> faster is Guile bytecode?

For the record, the unreleased Guile 2.2 uses a register VM (instead of
a stack VM), and has a different intermediate language on which more
optimization is done.  There's prospect for native code compilation too
for the future, from what I gather.  So Guile's performance isn't
exactly fixed at its current state, and improvements are happening at a
pretty impressive rate.

Taylan