Re: gnu in summer-of-code: more projects needed

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Saluton Brian,

BT Templeton <bpt@hcoop.net> writes:

> I'd like to continue my work on the Emacs Lisp compiler.

Would be great!

> Some areas that could use improvement:
>
>  * Implement Emacs-compatible lexical binding support

In what way is the current elisp implementation in Guile not
Emacs-compatible?

>  * Many Elisp subrs are not implemented in Guile-Elisp; some don't make
>    sense outside of Emacs, but the rest should be provided. I wrote
>    simple versions of many subrs in Elisp (using guile-ref, etc.), but
>    only just enough for subr.el to load more or less correctly.
>
>  * A more comprehensive testing framework would be nice. For example,
>    I'd like to be able to run Elisp tests in both Guile and Emacs.
>
>  * "Big variables," as proposed in
>    <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.devel/10750>, would
>    simplify the implementation, and would also be useful if anyone wants
>    to implement support for other Lisp-2 dialects in the future.
>
>  * Nil needs to be a list, a boolean, *and* a symbol, not just a list
>    and a boolean.
>
>  * Guile-Elisp needs to support aliases and buffer-local variables.
>
>  * Guile-Elisp could be a bit faster (Emacs is still faster for the
>    Gabriel benchmarks), though I assume Guile will do better with code
>    that uses lexical binding.

This all sounds useful, but I was hoping for something that would get
the project closer to Emacs integration.  Do you think anything can
realistically be done in that respect, or is the above already enough
work?

If the latter, would you be around after the summer to work on Emacs
integration?  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.