Re:Emacs internals: Deconstructing Lisp_Object in C (Part 2)
by _dky on Sunday March 08, 2026 @11:15AM
(#47297991)
One similarity I noticed was the intermediate representation from GCC frontend looks and feels very Lispy. Could be just a coincidence too.
Re:Emacs internals: Deconstructing Lisp_Object in C (Part 2)
by vintagedave on Monday March 09, 2026 @06:42AM
(#47307289)
That is fascinating. I never never seen GCC IR, only LLVM IR, which to me is more assembly-like in a generic no-specific-machine kind of way.
I (briefly) searched for more info but this SO answer[0] implies they're quite similar. I'd be interested in understanding more. I feel like much of computer science has normalised to specific approaches that 'won' in the industry, where Lisp is an example of something interesting that largely didn't win -- with notable exceptions like HN itself! [1] :) And so hearing about uses of things like Lisp concepts in areas we might not know they're being used would be wonderful HN content.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40799696/how-is-gcc-ir-d...
You made a great point. Since the original authors are the same, the fundamentals of the Emacs C core are indeed highly compiler-optimized. I hope I can come up with a way to fully understand and write about that history and relationship. (But to be honest, diving into that level of compiler history is a really hard topic to tackle!)
Thanks for the great inspiration and for taking the time to read!