\nI remember that a long time ago I was excited about the Guile Emacs project. It’s aim was to replace Elisp with Guile Scheme while maintaining comparability by making Scheme grok Elisp. To be honest, I can no longer recall why the idea excited me. It seems like empty engineering to me now.\n<\/p>\n
\nRegardless, after a decade the project has been restarted<\/a>. Robin Templeton gave a talk<\/a> at Emacs Conf 2024<\/a> on the current status of the project and what they hope to accomplish. A lot of what Templeton has to say boils down to:\n<\/p>\n \nI think my original enthusiasm was probably the result of the promise of increased performance but now that we have native compilation, that doesn’t seem so persuasive.\n<\/p>\n \nA lot of Templeton’s argument involves the possibility of reducing the amount of C code. Unlike many others, I don’t see C code as bad in itself, but Templeton makes the point that those parts of Emacs written in C are not extensible in the same sense that those parts written in Elisp are. \nThe takeaway is that my previous enthusiasm notwithstanding, I don’t really see the need for a Scheme Emacs. Still, it will be interesting to see how the projects plays out. Guile is a great platform and if Emacs were being written today, it would make sense to use it but that ship has sailed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember that a long time ago I was excited about the Guile Emacs project. It’s aim was to replace Elisp with Guile Scheme while maintaining comparability by making Scheme grok Elisp. To be honest, I can no longer recall … Continue reading \n
\nTo me, reducing the amount of non-extensible code is a worthy goal but I’m inclined to think that native compilation can do that just as well,\n<\/p>\n