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It would allow using any language that runs on the Guile VM. Guile has a compiler tower model where you define languages and their path towards being lowered to

It would allow using any language that runs on the Guile VM. Guile has a compiler tower model where you define languages and their path towards being lowered to bytecode. The main language, Scheme, lowers to the Tree-IL language (high-level intermediate representation), then to the CPS language (low-level IR), and finally to bytecode. Elisp lowers to Tree-IL, which means from there it takes the same path as Scheme does to reach bytecode, so it gets to benefit from all the performance optimizations happening in Tree-IL (like partial evaluation) and CPS (which are numerous, like common subexpression elimination, contification, dead code elimination, etc.) It's a pretty neat system where all these different languages can intermingle in a pleasing way.

senkora 2y ago
I know there was incomplete work done at some point on implementing JS for Guile: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/ECMAScript.html https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/ECMAScri... My understanding is that this is very far from being usable. But I mention it here because I suspect that some people on HN would be interested in the possibility of eventually running JS inside of Emacs.
- davexunit 2y ago
  Yeah I think that was something Andy Wingo added over a decade ago that hasn't seen much love since, but along with elisp it's another good example of the compiler tower. If you write a language frontend that lowers to Tree-IL then you get to ride the compiler train all the way to bytecode for free. I think that's pretty neat. Another interesting use-case for the compiler tower is writing a language that compiles a machine readable specification to another language. guile-xcb compiles XCB's XML spec to Scheme: https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-xcb/blob/master/language/xml-xcb/compile-scheme.scm https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-xcb/blob/master/language/xm...

senkora 2y ago

I know there was incomplete work done at some point on implementing JS for Guile: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/ECMAScript.html https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/ECMAScri... My understanding is that this is very far from being usable. But I mention it here because I suspect that some people on HN would be interested in the possibility of eventually running JS inside of Emacs.

davexunit 2y ago
Yeah I think that was something Andy Wingo added over a decade ago that hasn't seen much love since, but along with elisp it's another good example of the compiler tower. If you write a language frontend that lowers to Tree-IL then you get to ride the compiler train all the way to bytecode for free. I think that's pretty neat. Another interesting use-case for the compiler tower is writing a language that compiles a machine readable specification to another language. guile-xcb compiles XCB's XML spec to Scheme: https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-xcb/blob/master/language/xml-xcb/compile-scheme.scm https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-xcb/blob/master/language/xm...