Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[immerrr again]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 7:18 AM, John Wiegley <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> If the gap between C (or a hypothetical Lisp-like), and Emacs Lisp, could be
> reduced to zero, I'd absolutely want everything to be in Emacs Lisp. That has
> been my dream for Emacs since I can remember, as I'm prefer playing on the
> Lisp side much more than the C side.
>
> I once tried to make Emacs Lisp my "primary language". The speed just wasn't
> there, not to mention a few other things (control over memory layout, direct
> access to file handles, integration with C libraries, etc). There are several
> things we'd need to turn Emacs Lisp into a general purpose, well-performing
> language, sufficient to replace all our C code.
>

A wild idea would be to try rewriting the Emacs Lisp interpreter in
RPython [1]. It is a "framework for writing dynamic language
interpreters" and is used for implementing pypy [2] and pixie [3]
(which is a Lisp dialect). It accepts interpreter code in a subset of
Python, which is still quite high-level, that can be translated to C
using GCC as a backend. It comes with interpreter-related goodies,
like FFI, several implementations of GC, code flow analyzers and an
implementation of a tracing JIT. I would guess it would help with
performance a bit.

1. https://rpython.readthedocs.org/
2. http://pypy.org/
3. https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie