3 I've now finished my currently planned work on the Emacs Lisp
4 translator in guile-core CVS.
6 It works well enough for experimentation and playing around with --
7 see the README file for details of what it _can_ do -- but has two
10 - Most Emacs Lisp primitives are not yet implemented. In particular,
11 there are no buffer-related primitives.
13 - Performance compares badly with Emacs. Using a handful of
14 completely unscientific tests, I found that Guile was between 2 and
15 20 times slower than Emacs. (See the comment in
16 lang/elisp/example.el for details of tests and results.)
18 Interestingly, both these restrictions point in the same direction:
19 the way forward is to define the primitives by compiling a
20 preprocessed version of the Emacs source code, not by trying to
21 implement them in Scheme. (Which, of course, is what Ken Raeburn's
22 project is already trying to do.)
24 Given this conclusion, I expect that most of the translator's Scheme
25 code will eventually become obsolete, replaced by bits of Emacs C
26 code. Until then, though, it should have a role:
28 - as a guide to the Guile Emacs project on how to interface to the
29 Elisp support in libguile (notably, usage of `@fop' and `@bind')
31 - as a proof of concept and fun thing to experiment with
33 - as a working translator that could help us develop our picture of
34 how we want to integrate translator usage in general with the rest