Re: An idea, now that we have dynamic loading

[Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org> writes:

>>>>> "TT" == Tom Tromey <tom@tromey.com> writes:
TT> https://github.com/tromey/el-compilador

TT> This still has a bunch of bugs but it has successfully turned some elisp
TT> into C. I have an emacs branch where I replaced some of the code in subr.c
TT> with elisp.

John> Very nice! This is just what I was thinking of, so what do you need to help
John> this project mature?

I think the main thing is feeling like it matters.  One of my long-term
goals was to have more of Emacs be written in Emacs Lisp, and this was a
supporting technology for that.  (Other pieces were the FFI and gcc-jit
wrappers.)

However when hacking on it I ended up taking two different tacks: one
was rewriting bits of the C core in elisp; and the other was trying to
compile bits of elisp (say, stuff from subr.el or something) to C.  It
wasn't clear to me which of these was more fruitful.

Anyway, the backend has some bugs, and it generates "Emacs C core"-style
C code, not "Emacs dynamic module"-style C code.


If you're just interested in performance, though, maybe my JIT is a
better choice.  I haven't tried submitting the JIT here, yet, mainly
because there's still one more feature I want to finish (improved
calling convention, plus maybe inlining); but also because Stefan
pointed out a very interesting JIT paper to me, which I think would
require a ground-up rewrite (avoiding libjit).

Tom