The guile-emacs branch afaik did not use precompiled byte-code. So startup took ages. Guile itself is making huge progress. There's ongoing work for JIT compil

The guile-emacs branch afaik did not use precompiled byte-code. So startup took ages. Guile itself is making huge progress. There's ongoing work for JIT compilation as well. Andy Wingo drives this work. And he brings a lot of experience from work on the V8 Javascript engine. I see no technical reason why guile-elisp should be any slower than normal elisp. It's just that some of the optimizations have not yet been put into place. After a switchover all the improvements from Guile will come for free in the future. See the branches named "master", "lightning" and "wip-elisp" here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git