Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:

>> A subset of Elisp that doesn't have dynamic binding might well produce code
>> that could be of use to us,

> That's what I had in mind all the time. We could aim to the subset of Elisp
> that can be translated to a fast enough target code, while remaining
> superior to C in convenience.

> Or a more radical approach: a Lispy language, easy to learn by those who
> already know Elisp, but which can be translated all the way to something as
> performant as the current C code, while being capable of interacting with
> it. This way, whenever someone needs fast code, he would use this other
> dialect instead of writing C, or the slow Elisp (or avoiding the task
> altogether.)

If it can leverage what the contributor already knows about Elisp, I'm all for
it. I wonder what RMS' and Eli's reaction would be.

If they are amenable, would you be willing to prototype it? If we could see a
language description for the subset/alternate, and a sample compilation into C
for some of the functions we have in Emacs core (that is, reimplementing them
as a proof of concept), that would help sell it.

John