Re: On elisp running native

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > This means it's GCC-specific, and moreover requires native support for
  > loading ELF objects, right?  Which means it will probably run well
  > only on GNU/Linux and maybe the *BSD systems.

In principle there is nothing wrong with that.  The main purpose of
every GNU package is to make the GNU system better.  We cooperate with
support for other systems when that is not difficult, as long as
someone chooses to do the work.  But we should not reject a useful
feature simply because it can't be (or hasn't been) implemented on
a non-GNU system.

However, I have doubts that compiling Elisp into machine code is worth
the trouble.  And I think it is likely to be fragile.  The option
exists of writing C code by hand.  Compiling the Elisp code would be
quicker and avoid errors, but will that savings be realized enough
times to justify the time used for developing and maintaining the
compiler?  I tend to doubt it.

How about compiling Elisp code into C?  That should be a lot less work,
and it might be useful in other ways too.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)