Re: Compiling Elisp to a native code with a GCC plugin

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Wojciech" == Wojciech Meyer <address@hidden> writes:

Wojciech> Recent version of GCC allow developing plugins.  That would
Wojciech> solve JITing intermediate representation (e.g. current
Wojciech> bytecode) to the native code across different platforms.  What
Wojciech> do you think about it? Would that be possible or there might
Wojciech> be some problems that would make it impossible (I am talking
Wojciech> especially about dynamic scoping and GC interaction).

I think you can compile elisp without needing a plugin.  Just convert
the bytecode to C, and compile that.  This is actually quite easy.

However, it is not very likely to result in a performance improvement
right now.  A similar idea was tried and did not work out:

    http://www.mundell.ukfsn.org/native/

I think this idea might be worth revisiting when lexbind is merged in,
emphasis on "might".  E.g., it seems to me that this approach might work
ok for the recently-discussed range-map code.

As I recall, in my profiles, the GC and the regexp matcher were more
costly the bytecode interpreter (though of course this is
workload-dependent).  If you are interested in performance, I suggest
doing your own profiles and starting there.

Tom