Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[David Kastrup]

Robin Templeton <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> The GUILE bridge is there.  Robin Templeton's status of the port is that
>> it is mostly complete, with strings/buffers being the most notable part
>> obliterating acceptable performance via thick glue layers between Emacs'
>> and GUILE's different implementations of similar concepts.
>
> Unifying the Elisp and Scheme string types is important, but more of a
> long-term goal to allow convenient and efficient interaction between the
> languages. Guile-Emacs's performance problems are mostly unrelated to
> string handling. Elisp string representation is unchanged from standard
> Emacs, except for trivial changes to make them an application-defined
> Guile type.

Ok, this is different _currently_ from the situation we have in LilyPond
where string interaction between C++, LilyPond, and GUILE was already
ubiquitous when GUILE 2.0 started supporting Unicode in its strings.

Emacs has strategies and conventions for passing strings between C
(literals, but also I/O and stuff) and Elisp reasonably cheaply whenever
cheap is an option.  When it is running on a GUILE VM, I don't see that
it will get by without addressing similar questions regarding the GUILE
domain.

Though to be honest: the typical Emacs programmer is not usually exposed
to the details of byte code in any way either.

-- 
David Kastrup