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by technomancy 5271 days ago
> What we need is a proper compiler, one that can compile Emacs Lisp to either native code

This has actually been done (possibly badly?) and turned out to be a wash in terms of performance.
1 comments
jrockway 5271 days ago
Yeah. It might be worth trying again, considering the good performance of newer language runtimes like SBCL, Node.js, and Unladen Swallow.
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dextorious 5271 days ago
What "unladen swallow"? That project did not have the expected improvements and was abandoned...
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jrockway 5271 days ago
Unladen Swallow might not be usable in production, but as a research project it's pretty interesting. One of its problems was supporting C-based extensions, but that's not a requirement for Emacs Lisp, and so a similar project might be more effective for Emacs than for Python. (I also like the idea of using LLVM for dynamic language runtimes, but as time goes forward this seems less likely to work out.)
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