My not very well-informed take on the situation is: Yes, Emacs seems to make a lot of progress in many directions. Latest git master does have elisp native co

My not very well-informed take on the situation is: Yes, Emacs seems to make a lot of progress in many directions. Latest git master does have elisp native compilation support (via libgccjit). Various elisp semantics have been modernized (support for common-lisp style lexical closures). Still it is rather lightweight (compared with, say firefox), you can download upstream source and compile&install it in minutes rather than hours.