There's some new development going on that compiles Emacs Lisp to native code with GCC and it is a real performance improvement. I've been using it on an unstable Emacs build for the past few weeks and I can feel the difference—noticeably snappier and more satisfying.

It's not 100% ready for day-to-day use yet—the deferred compilation logic seems to be recompiling more often than it has to—but I've been quite happy with it so far, and it will make a substantial improvement for Emacs users once it's stable and rolled out. Hoping it can be released with Emacs 28 or 29 at the latest :).