

Guile Emacs Todo - pmoriarty
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacsTodo

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davexunit
I really hope to see Guile Emacs become the canonical GNU Emacs someday. Guile
will give Emacs a foundation to add a bunch of features to Elisp that it does
not have like delimited continuations. Exciting stuff.

~~~
swah
Will that change make Emacs multithreaded somehow? Otherwise I don't think we
can expect Emacs to improve much...

~~~
davexunit
Yes, Guile has threads, too.

~~~
taeric
I think the question is more of whether it will make the core semantics of
emacs and elisp threaded. Which is a different question compared to whether or
not the vm has threads. Right?

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wtbob
I really, really hope that Common Lisp ends up being the next generation
engine for emacs. Scheme is a neat language, but it's not the bulletproof
industrial behemoth CL is.

~~~
davexunit
This isn't about Emacs changing the implementation language, but changing the
VM that Elisp runs on. Don't worry, there won't be any Scheme in your Elisp.

~~~
pmoriarty
I wish Emacs would switch to Scheme as an implementation language. Scheme is a
lot more elegant and a lot less crusty than CL, not to mention Elisp.

~~~
davexunit
I agree, Scheme is much better both CL and Elisp, but it's not worth switching
to lose decades of Elisp. Better to just have Elisp run on a better VM.

~~~
pmoriarty
The switch doesn't have to happpen all at once; and, considering how much
Elisp would have to be rewritten, it couldn't happen all at once.

Rather, I hope the switch is made gradually, and most of all that Elisp fans
don't dig their heels in against it, but rather work to make the transition
smoother.

~~~
muuh-gnu
Considering that the push for Guile is not coming from the Emacs community,
but from the Guile community in order to promote Guile, I guess that Emacs
will be forked as soon as they deprecate Elisp and start forcing people to use
Scheme. Switching to Scheme will be GNU Emacs's suicide.

~~~
pmoriarty
Let me ask you this:

If Emacs and all of its extension code was completely rewritten in Scheme,
what would be the point of sticking with Elisp? And how would using a Scheme-
only Emacs be "GNU Emacs's suicide"?

What concrete value does Elisp add over Scheme?

CL vs Scheme, I could see an (unconvincing to me) argument for, but Elisp?
Elisp?

Don't get me wrong. I'd much rather use Elisp than most any other non-lispy
language. I just don't see anything in it to recommend it over a modern Scheme
like Guile.

But I'm open to being shown the errors of my ways. What's so great about
Elisp? Please enlighten me.

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robert_tweed
I was rather disappointed this wasn't a port of TodoMVC to Emacs.

Any particular reason this is front-page news? I'm not currently an Emacs
user, but I've been considering it. Maybe I'm missing something notable buried
in this list.

~~~
_delirium
There's been periodic interest here in the long-discussed project of rebasing
Emacs's runtime on top of the Guile VM, rather than its current custom VM.
Eg.:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449488),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338602)

This article has a concrete set of TODOs for getting that to work, which I
suspect appeals to people interested in that general project, but frustrated
that it seems to be moving glacially.

This is about the Emacs internals, though. Not (for the moment) necessarily of
interest to someone just using Emacs, or contemplating doing so.

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taeric
The memory and performance regressions are frightening. I don't know enough
about the specifics to know that this is a good or a bad idea, but it
definitely looks like they have their work cut out for them.

This does remind me of the post from the other day about a time traveler. With
an expectation that things will get faster, the opposite seems to be the norm.
:(

~~~
latiera
You can read this as "mainline Guile Emacs is never gonna happen".

Guile is very low quality software (that goes double, hell, triple, for "non
free" platforms like OSX and Windows) and Emacs has a reputation for being
rock solid on all platforms it runs on.

The Guile fanboys may wish for Guile to replace the current core in mainline
but realistically speaking (Guile has what, 1/2 developers?) that's never
going to happen.

If I had to guess, I'd say most Emacs users and developers couldn't care less
about Scheme/Guile (if not actively hostile).

~~~
taeric
I'm leaning mostly towards the "couldn't care less" department. Though, I do
think it is a shame if there are items we are missing out on because of it.

I am curious on just how many/what features would be on the table with an
alternative vm. And then, how hard it would be to just add those features
piecemeal instead of moving whole hog?

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sohkamyung
This lwn.net article from October 8, 2014 [
[http://lwn.net/Articles/615220/](http://lwn.net/Articles/615220/) ] contains
some info and discussion from various developers concerning this topic.

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agumonkey
Seems there's still a lot to do. I naively expected thing to be close to
fruition.

