Re: 64-bit lossage

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> writes:
> Can you estimate the chances of that happening?  (Sorry, I don't know
> the status of the Emacs-in-Guile project.)

No, I think it's too early to say.

I got an Emacs to the point of running using the Guile allocator and
GC once before, with most object types being Guile "smobs" rather than
normal Scheme object types.  Some aspects of the approach I used were
less than optimal, because I wanted to reduce the internal API changes
scattered through the Emacs code (e.g., pass around a lisp object
instead of a struct pointer), and the performance was rather poor.

This time around, I'm integrating the more reasonable and
Guile-independent changes into the main code base, and looking at
making some of those API changes to make the Guile work cleaner.  I'm
hoping that soon I'll be ready to start a branch and see if I can get
other interested people to help out.  In fact, I should probably put
some thought into how development should go once the branch is
started, and what's really needed in order to start.  Perhaps it could
be started now....

Once something is actually running again, and the interface changes
are done, we can evaluate the performance issues and the status of the
Guile lisp-loader code, and see where we want to go from there.

Ken