Re: Why is Elisp slow?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2019-05-02, at 22:00, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:

> On Thu, May 02, 2019 at 09:13:28PM +0200, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> > (My personal rant to package authors is that they are way too eager to
>> > implement stuff in Lisp which cannot possibly be fast enough or
>> > scalable enough, instead of urging Emacs to provide new C primitives
>> > and core features, or, better, submitting patches to implement such
>> > features in C.  Two cases in point are linum-mode and fci-mode.  End
>> > of rant.)
>> 
>> That is an interesting POV, although I'm not sure if I agree.  IOW,
>> I fully understand why people might do so.  I, for one, consider myself
>> pretty fluent in Elisp and hardly literate in C.
>
> This approach is known as "Ousterhout's dichotomy" [1], after John Ousterhout,
> author of Tcl (which was conceived as a very simple scripting language
> meant to extend existing applications). Tcl grew later a bytecode
> interpreter (as did elisp) -- making the C interface significantly
> more complex (but the interpreter significantly faster).
>
> Walking the trade-off between simple and efficient is interesting.

Thanks.  As usual, I learned something new from you...

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl