Re: guile and emacs and elisp, oh my!

[joakim]

Ken Raeburn <address@hidden> writes:

> On Apr 15, 2010, at 04:53, address@hidden wrote:
>> I find this very interesting. Do you have some form of plan how to
>> integrate this form of Guile and Emacs? Can it be done incrementally,
>> that is, can the current elisp system and the guile system coexist in
>> the same Emacs? If so, more hackers could help out with the integration,
>> maybe.
>
> I think I've written up some email in the past (you may have to search back 
> several months) about this.  My project -- changing Emacs to use Guile object 
> types (at least the simplest ones) and Guile's allocator and GC -- can be 
> done somewhat incrementally.  E.g., make sure Emacs uses accessor functions 
> or macros for all uses of type X outside of its own GC system (those changes 
> can be done upstream), and passes around Lisp_Object values rather than 
> pointers to struct Lisp_Foo (likewise), then redefine type X's implementation 
> using more appropriate Guile types, then work on type Y... currently strings, 
> symbols, vectors, and hashes are on my list; individual "misc" and 
> "vectorlike" types can come later, maybe.
>
> I have no intention of getting rid of elisp from emacs, most certainly.  As 
> for eventually replacing the entire Lisp implementation in Emacs with the 
> Guile one, well, I'm hoping that, like Andy suggested, it'll become an 
> obvious win to do so, but if we wind up for a while with two distinct 
> language interpreters (Emacs elisp and Guile VM) but a shared object system 
> and working communication between languages, while Andy madly tries to fix 
> whatever performance problem we might have run into with Guile's elisp 
> implementation :-), I'd be okay with that.
>
> I've recently updated my code to be based on a recent development version of 
> Emacs, though I haven't published the updated version yet and there appears 
> to be some kind of GC problem or something at the moment.  I also haven't got 
> it fully updated for guile 1.9.x (and the upcoming 2.0), which has a 
> different GC system anyways.  (The new GC system is Boehm's GC library.  
> There was an effort to make Emacs use it some time back, by Dave Love, and I 
> think some of those changes will be needed for Emacs-with-Guile-2.0.  So 
> updating that work might also be helpful?)
>
> But, now that we've got bzr upstream and branching should be relatively easy, 
> perhaps I should clean it up a little and push it all into a branch on 
> savannah, if the maintainers are interested?  If there's really interest in 
> working on it, I'd love to get some help....

I would love to have a look at it! Please push a branch.

> Ken
-- 
Joakim Verona