Re: Why is Elisp slow?

[Stefan Monnier]

> elisp is mostly interpreted (contrarily to C which is always compiled to
                                                      ^^^
                                                    almost

> native code, so directly executed by the CPU) and very very dynamic
> afaik, not that much optimized at byte-compilation afaiu from what I
> observed, and I guess not that much optimized from the VM point of view…

Emacs's implementation of Elisp is fairly naive and not carefully
optimized.  As a result it's not blazing fast.  This said, on the rare
occasions Elisp was compared to other systems it didn't seem nearly as
slow as I thought.  E.g. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's about
as fast as Python (not talking about things like PyPy, tho).


        Stefan