Some Emacs extensions contain C code

Posted Dec 16, 2024 15:56 UTC (Mon) by tome (subscriber, #3171)
Parent article: Using Guile for Emacs

Back when Andy Wingo finished developing a complete implementation of elisp in Guile (about 15 years ago!), the biggest impediment to Guile Emacs was due to the many Emacs extensions containing C code dependent on C code in Emacs that would be removed from Guile Emacs. It would take a mountain of work to migrate those extensions to Guile Emacs. That's my recollection. But this article mentions that

> A year after their last GSoC project, they had a Guile-Emacs prototype that "was completely compatible with Emacs functionality and with external extensions".

I don't know enough about Emacs internals or extensions in C to sort out this contradiction. Without the C extensions roadblock it seems the advantages of Guile Emacs would be overwhelming enough to overcome any merely political objections.

Some Emacs extensions contain C code

Posted Dec 16, 2024 18:20 UTC (Mon) by paroneayea (guest, #96661) [Link]

Note that the lead author of porting Emacs Lisp to Guile was Robin Templeton themselves, mentored by Andy Wingo.

Some Emacs extensions contain C code

Posted Dec 16, 2024 21:08 UTC (Mon) by fw (subscriber, #26023) [Link]

In case anyone is confused by C extensions for Emacs, I think it's about this: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp...