Re:Bringing GNU Emacs to native code [video]
by bjoli on Monday May 04, 2020 @11:38AM
(#23069291)
Guile (the VM) runs elisp just fine. There has been zero optimization work done though so it is quite slow. The reason they did not go with guile was more political than anything else. It was also understandable from their point of view (and I say this as a guile weenie)
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It was somewhat political, but it was more of an issue of manpower. Also, Guile is basically maintained by one developer (as far as I've heard). It's pretty dangerous for Emacs to rely on a project like that.
No, the reason is still slow string buffers.
Politically everybody wants emacs to switch to guile.
Iirc Guile-emacs relies on Emacs for all string related functionality. The overhead comes for dynamic bindings that are currently slower in guiles elisp implementation. I haven't looked into it since talking to Robin about it in 2016.
You maybe have some more inside info, but back in 2016 I remember a lot of complaints and that guile was a liability for the much bigger Emacs project. Maybe even people threatening to retire as maintainers