Re: emacs with guile instead of elisp

[John Tobey <jtobey@channel1.com>]

Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de> writes:

> What are the major obstacles/objections to writing an editor that looks almost
> like GNU emacs, but uses guile instead of elisp as extension language?

mdj> Obstacle: Emacs is a large program.

Just a few random thoughts:

1. Emacs is 'undumped' so Guilemacs will also need to be unexec'ed if
   startup speed is at all a concern.

2. X windows support in Emacs is currently tightly bound to ELisp.
   I'd suggest delaying the introduction of X support until the basics
   are working.  On the other hand, I don't know how feasible it might
   be to base the program on existing Guile-GUI interfaces, since I'm
   not intimately familiar with them.

3. If I may make so bold as to speak for Richard Stallman, this is
   exactly the type of thing he'd like to see.  He'd probably be
   interested to hear about work in this direction, and he may even be
   a valuable resource.

-John

mdj> Solution: Rewrite part of the C code to use Guile, but keep the ELisp
mdj>           code untouched.
mdj> 
mdj> Requirement: Guile must know how to read ELisp.
mdj> 
mdj> Status: There exists an experimental Guile which can do this.
mdj>         However, further improvement is necessary to get a robust
mdj>         behaviour.