Re: Shrinking the C core

[Emanuel Berg]

Lynn Winebarger wrote:

> Instead of discussing porting emacs to CL, why don't people
> work on porting the compiler techniques used in CL to emacs?

Absolutely, that is what one should do!

And with cl-lib and SLIME and other tools, Emacs-CL
integration has reached impressive results already.

What I understood from the previous discussion the speed
advantage for SBCL was to a large degree because of explicit
optimizations the programmer would put in the CL source.
Those are perhaps not so acute to bring over to Elisp, since
such use in an editor-environment probably would be limited.
However I think it would still be interesting and useful,
since we could use them in libraries and vanilla Emacs Elisp
source. In time, even Joe Elisp hackers would use them
directly, in their .emacs files.

Also the speed advantage (and whole issue of Elisp being slow)
is likely to diminish because of the very impressive native
compilation feature, which has showed great results while
still being at an early stage. Native compilation will also
benefit from improvements in compiler design and future
computer architecture progress.

So IIUC the only big thing SBCL has, and we don't, is
multi-threading. Bummer, but it is what it is.

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