[dleslie]

Emacs is a lisp; there's a very small and tiny layer of C at the bottom and everything else is a tower of lisp. You can interact with it with other languages, via many different means, but in the process you lose the joy and power of working in a live lisp environment.

[noch]

> there's a very small and tiny layer of C at the bottom [...]

That layer of C is hardly "tiny." Everything from font drivers to process management to a lisp interpreter to window and buffer code, to overlays, and a lot more.

[dleslie]

There's 1,262,537 lines of elisp in 25.3, compared to 291,203 lines of C and C headers. While there is a fair amount of C code to do what you mentioned, much of the C is definitions for the core lisp language with 1,483 DEFUN statements in it.

But yah, not tiny, sure. I'm looking forward to it being replaced via the REmacs project.

https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs