Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Tom Tromey <address@hidden> writes:

> You don't really need to do any subsetting. With a decent compiler you can
> just write elisp.
>
> This is pretty much what I am trying to do here:
>
> https://github.com/tromey/el-compilador

Ok, you've got the PL side of me rather excited now. :) Are you planning
optimization passes during the transform from elisp to C?

I noticed your files lack a copyright or license. Is this something you would
be willing to assign to the FSF once the bugs are worked out? Even if we don't
use it to rewrite our current C files, it would be an interesting addition to
the build process, if we do decide to cross-compile some Emacs Lisp code over
to C.

For it to be worth the complexity, however, I'd like to see some performance
numbers, or examples of features it gains us that we can't have easily
otherwise (like transparent FFI). If the difference between compiled-to-C and
our current byte-compiler is only 10%, that would be good to know. If the win
is huge, I wonder how long until I can have a compiled Gnus. :)

Other than that, I like it!

John