Re: Why is Elisp slow?

[Óscar Fuentes]

Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> writes:

> Bringing a C api and use Lisp for high level or interactive functions
> reduces overheads, simplify the C code we have and enables a more
> modular design. But I know that try to do that now is not realistic with
> the amount of code and people we have. So that's why I was talking about
> Guile, but after all it seems not to be realistic either.
>
> So whats the alternative? Keep our interpreter as is and deal with few
> developers (and decreasing) and performance issues and a lot of code to
> maintain?

Emacs doesn't suffer from scarcity of Elisp programmers. Emacs lacks C
programmers.

Maybe it is related to how easy it is to get something working on each
language. Elisp has a huge advantage over C on that aspect, not only
because Elisp is more simple and way more expressive, but also because
of the REPL (no edit-compile-run-crash hamster wheel) and because Emacs
is, in practice, a Lisp machine with the associated advantages.

Elisp is a hacker's dream. Not so C.