Bringing GNU Emacs to native code [video]

Re:Bringing GNU Emacs to native code [video] by metroholografix on Monday May 04, 2020 @12:16PM (#23069850)

It hasn't already been done, no. The Emacs variants you mentioned (that IMV should not be referred to as "Emacs") are from-scratch new implementations of just the concept behind Emacs, but not GNU Emacs itself. They are not compatible with GNU Emacs, they don't even support a small fraction of GNU Emacs features, and are thus doomed to obsolescence / non-existent market share.

So far, nobody -that I know of- has tried to move GNU Emacs to Common Lisp. GNU Emacs is a well-known, well-used platform and moving to Common Lisp could very well be worth the upfront costs.

Wishful thinking aside, the GNU Emacs development community has hunkered down behind Emacs Lisp, so improving it will bring immediate and tangible benefits to every GNU Emacs user. I love Common Lisp and do use SBCL for a lot of personal projects, but I also love GNU Emacs and I will take any improvements there that I can get. Watching Emacs Lisp become a more viable general purpose language (improved performance means an expanded set of problems that it can now address) is a great development. Stefan Monnier on emacs-devel:

  The main benefit of such a compiler is not to run existing Elisp
  code faster (99% of existing Elisp code runs fast enough that the
  user won't notice if it runs faster) but to make it practical to
  write other Elisp code which would otherwise be too slow. But for
  that to work well, you want the new compiler to be
  available "everywhere", rather than just on some platforms. So it
  will only start being useful when it works on GNU/Linux, macOS,
  Windows, ARM, RISC-V, x86, amd64, MIPS, younameit (AFAIK
  lbgccjit's CPU coverage is already good enough for that, so the
  main barrier here is the OS support), and when it's not just an
  option at compile-time but when it's included in all builds.

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Re:Bringing GNU Emacs to native code [video] by mikelevins on Monday May 04, 2020 @01:03PM (#23070518)

You appear to consider "Emacs" and "GNU Emacs" synonymous. I explicitly do not.

Hemlock is not a reimplementation of GNU Emacs; it's derived from earlier Emacsen, just as GNU Emacs is. Hemlock in particular is based on ZWEI, and was in version 0.99 around the time that work started on the GNU Emacs project. It's a slightly older sibling of GNU Emacs, rather than a descendant of it.

GNU Emacs has undoubtedly become the de facto standard Emacs, but I don't see why that disqualifies other branches of the Emacs family tree from using the name that all of them inherit from the venerable TECO implementation.

My point was that Emacsen have already been built in Common Lisp, but that they do not serve as substitutes for GNU Emacs--a point with which you appear to agree.

Maybe we even agree on the reason why: because no Emacs implementation can substitute for GNU Emacs without supporting its ecosystem. The amount of work needed to do that would be enormous, whether the proposed substitute is written in Common Lisp or in something else.

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Re:Bringing GNU Emacs to native code [video] by metroholografix on Monday May 04, 2020 @01:41PM (#23070986)

Sure, I just wanted to clarify and make it very clear that GNU Emacs in CL hasn't even been attempted since that was what the poster you originally replied to, equated "Emacs" with.

As you said, the value lies primarily in the ecosystem. Common Lisp is by far the better language, but GNU Emacs is by far the most empowering/practical environment. I don't think enormous work would be needed, there are plenty of powerful shortcuts one could take (some ideas are in this thread) and Emacs Lisp can be made to run on top of Common Lisp but it's safe to say that for whatever reasons the will/intent is simply not there.

Emacs Lisp is what we have to go on with and it's nice to see that it is not stagnating.

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